What do you do when you dream of something but you don’t have the ready-made tools for building it? You take things in your own hands and build your own tools.

We continue our guest post series with an exciting story, coming from Radu, the man who built up a 3D scanner from scratch.

Radu’s kid getting 3D scanned by Tulemod’s built 3D scanner

If you haven’t heard about my city, you certainly heard about Trrransylvania! Well, that’s were Cluj is. Nope, I haven’t met any vampires (yet!) but I surely met lots of IT guys around here. With more than 10.000 people working in tech companies, Cluj is also arguably called the Sillicon Valley of Eastern Europe…  Funny enough, the startup that I am working on right now was born in the real Silicon Valley. More exactly, in Palo Alto.

Tulemod is the typical tech startup, built by technology enthusiasts, trying to change the world by developing a disruptive technology. Our vertical is the fashion industry and we’re working on a solution for digitizing apparel and enabling users to mix and match looks online with the maximum realism. It might seem an utopia but it’s actually a challenging problem that can be solved using a mixture of computer vision, 3D modelling, 3D graphics and enough programming.

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.