Hey people!
I suppose this is a “Finished Project”, but I didn’t really want to put it there. This is a model of mine rendered with Edge in BI. I guess this qualifies as a test because I have barely used this in my years of playing in Blender. Please zoom, it’s more detailed than this thumb shows
Basically what I have here is a flat black/no specular material, AA at 16 to get rid of choppy bright lines, and Edge turned on and made a yellow color. What the threshold does is show more or less of the lines of your object. So here I have it at it’s highest setting(255), but a threshold of 1 will barely show the outline of the Suzanne, and hardly anything else, so play with that for sure. I also have a subsurf of 3 on the monkey, merely because I like the high-poly look, but that is up to you as well. There are no lights in the scene at all. BUT, you can use lights AND specularity and get a totally different look.
Here I used a regular material on the floor (without spec, but a little bit brighter than total black), and lights. So what we have here is the Edge effect on the guns, but shadows on the floor as well:
All of this renders in seconds by the way, no matter how many polys you have in the scene. Lights/shadows/spec will take a bit longer to render, but not very much. Have fun with this, and thanks again!
Here’s one with flat black/blue spec, one area light, and Edge made orange and at 255:
Really nice renders. With Freestyle here, we can add outlines and interior lines using that NPR render as well. Put the mesh in edit mode and select all edges them mark them as Freestyle edges from the menu. Activate Freestyle in the Render panel and switch over to the Layers context. From here we can add two line styles. One for the contour and one for the interior lines that we just marked. What is nice about Freestyle is that you can specify a different color for each line set, not like Blender Internal edge where you are stuck with a single line color and width. In this example I also added a Calligraphy modifier to the line thickness as well as changing the interior lines to a slightly darker green. The main drawback I found is that when using the subsurf modifier you have to actually apply it to the mesh before Freestyle will consider the higher density mesh for evaluation.
@Atom: Thanks a lot! One MAJOR Issue…Freestyle doesn’t work with Intel cards I have seen it in it’s infancy, and it is certainly a great addition, but I am at a loss unfortunately
.Freestyle doesn’t work with Intel cards
That seems very odd. Freestyle does not use the GPU, AFAIK. It is CPU based technology. Have you tried it with the most recent release?
So my posted BLEND file produces a black screen on your system?
@Atom: It actually renders, but it would crash before. I’ll have to check it out more in the latest 2.67a. Dyntopo crashes too, as well as the user preferences(I have to drop an opengl32.dll into the folder for user prefs not to crash the program). All linked to Intel graphics I have been told over and over.