f r e e s t y l e
The development work for integrating Freestyle into Blender is still ongoing. Maxime Curioni
obtained great results during the google summer of code 2008 where it all started. After continuing
the integration work for few more months, Maxime passed the torch to Tamito Kajiyama who realized
impressive progresses since. You can follow the developments on Tamito's blog:
Freestyle is a software for Non-Photorealistic Line Drawing rendering from 3D scenes. It is designed as a programmable interface to allow maximum control over the style of the final drawing: the user "programs" how the silhouettes and other feature lines from the 3D model should be turned into stylized strokes using a set of programmable operators dedicated to style description. This programmable approach, inspired by the shading languages available in photorealistic renderers such as Pixar's RenderMan, overcomes the limitations of integrated software with access to a limited number of parameters and permits the design of an infinite variety of rich and complex styles. The system currently focuses on pure line drawing as a first step. The style description language is Python augmented with our set of operators.
Freestyle was developed in the framework of a research project dedicated to the study of stylized line drawing rendering from 3D scenes. Details about this research can be found at:
http://artis.imag.fr/Projects/Style
This software is distributed under the terms of the GPL License.
To get a quick sense of Freetsyle, you can watch a brief introductory video or have a look at the gallery of results.