Freestyle broken line question and screen updates???

I have several questions about Freestyle. This is an example of a discontinuous line on the outline of a figure. I am tired of tweaking parameters without seeing live screen updates (planned implementation??) but suspect someone here can figure out the problem. As I move through the frames, the position of the break changes as do the number of breaks?? Any ideas, please… Thank you.

Second question: I understand the latest RC version (which I am using) includes the option to Cache the View Map. I have this checked, but don’t have a clue how this is supposed to help. Without a Preview Viewport and live updating of style changes, I am not sure what this feature is supposed to do. I get weary of the “code” mode of working and as an artist I am looking forward to any further updates to the Live Viewport Preview, and Tweaking of line styles with more immediate feedback. Other software programs provide this functionality and I am very enthusiastic about this possibility being implemented in Blender. I appreciate all of the hard work and dedication involved in the Freestyle aspect.
I am also looking forward to the BEER development and tie-in to Freestyle or perhaps JOT?? Again, with live screen preview to make it artist friendly, Blender will take off as the tool of choice.

Thank you again for any assistance.

Late addition: I appreciate the new SVG output choice, it works superbly, but did not see an option to tell it where to place the output files, except at the root of the blend file output directory???

i’ve lost touch with a lot of the recent developments related to freestyle. i haven’t tried the viewmap caching or even the svg export, but as for those broken lines, i found that it sometimes helps to disable “chaining” in the line geometry settings.

keep in mind however, there is no real solution to the frame-to-frame flickers… only workarounds… which may or may not work for your specific project. for example, if there’s relatively little motion in the scene, a bit of motion blur on the freestyle lines might help reduce the flickering.

blender’s viewport project seems to be the only light at the end of the tunnel regarding the current npr limitations. at the very least, it will allow for custom glsl shaders. and in my experience, that’s the better choice for animations. there’s no flickering of lines, but that also means no easy line styling or texturing.

another option you might want to explore is using a sobel filter in the compositor to draw your toon lines. i haven’t tried it for an animation yet, but it looks like it could work a lot better than freestyle.

broken lines are typical in Freestyle renders, and addressing them usually requires additional modeling efforts.

In general, smooth shading should be applied to mesh objects, and the Face Smoothness option has to be enabled. Otherwise, lines tend to be jaggy and broken (see this blog post for more detail).

Concerning the arm and sleeve in your render, I guess their mesh topology is cylindrical. I don’t have much idea of why the silhouette lines are so broken given that topology. If you have applied a subsurf modifier, I suggest changing the level parameter to a finer or coarser value (usually finer meshes result in better line quality).

Also, it looks like you have applied a set of line style options that make line thickness variable along strokes. If that is the case, try to disable all such options and see if you still get broken lines. If broken lines still persist, then that means it’s likely that you need to address them through model improvements specifically geared toward Freestyle.

Freestyle lines in viewport preview are supposed to respond to parameter changes. Freestyle viewport preview works only in the Blender Internal and not with Cycles at the moment.

Freestyle SVG output files are generated in the same directory (specified by the Output parameter in the Render options) where animation results are saved.

Thank you for the assistance. With the information and more experimenting, I was able to get a line look that works better for my purposes. I am including a frame from a turn-table of the character as proof of concept.



Paul

Cool, thanks for the feedback.