In the quest to make the process of rendering more appealing and help artists get better, faster renders, we are launching the guest post series on the RenderStreet blog.

NPR (Freestyle) is a feature that gets more and more attention from the Blender users. We invited Bong Wee Kwong aka Light BWK – who is a NPR pro – to write about optimising Freestyle and explain it all to pieces.

Overview 

Freestyle is an awesome post process line art renderer. With Freestyle lines drawing alone, you can make a lot of cool artworks. If you have been following the twitter tag #b3d the past few months, you’ll notice many cool artworks are done with it. Freestyle is available for Blender Internal and (good news) will be available in Cycles for the next release, Blender 2.72. In essence, Freestyle is its own renderer, meaning it has its own way of handling line rendering.

Here is the overview of what Freestyle does when you press F12. First, Freestyle loads the mesh in view into RAM (each frame), creates a view map from selected edge types, then stylize the selected lines. In reality the processes for Freestyle to render lines is more than that, but for this article I think it is best to just show the simplified version.