#line rendering

 Here’s a mini-tut sharing my experience with figuring out how to render Freestyle in Blender scenes, in this specific diagram/technical/architecture-friendly style where visible edges are shown with solid lines, and hidden edges are shown with dashed lines.

It is actually quite simple..Once you figure out how to get freestyle going (Tick Freestyle in the Render tab), and edit linesets/styles (go to the next tab, RenderLayers, Scroll down and unfold both Freestyle and Freestyle Line Set):

You start with one lineset, which you can use to render the visible edges.

Add a second lineset, which selects Hidden edges rather than Visible (in Visibility section), and enable Dashed line option (at the bottom), setting the first two numbers to 4, 4 (representing a 4px on, 4px off dash pattern).

You might also want to make sure that the base thickness of your dashed lineset is less than the main lineset (check the Thickness tab). I chose 3 for my dashed lines and 5 for my main lines.

Finally, according to the scale of the diagram, you might want Blender to reduce line opacity or size according to distance from the camera.

You can do that by adding a 'distance from camera' modifier in the Alpha tab. In my test document, I used Subtract mode with 0.5 influence, and then selected the all the objects I wanted and hit 'fill range by selection'.

I did that for both the main line style and dashed line style.

The result of the above looks like this:

And here is a version using a toon material, since that is more typical:

Hey everyone,

as i promised on Twitter here is the Tutorial on how to create glowing lines using CINEMA 4D's "Sketch&Toon". The cool thing about S&T is that it enables you to render your lines in an "Additive" mode. This is so cool to create to glowing lines as shown above and it's fairly simple. This technique works best when using "Splines", for example the Tracer of MoGraph can create really nice splines. Just follow my tips below and your time to glow is near :)

1.) Sketch & Toon Material

Well first of create a Sketch & Toon material by going to your Material Editors menu called Create. There you'll find an entry called Shader. Choose from it's menu Sketch Material.

2.) Open the ME (Material Editor) via double click

You should now see something like the following image. Make sure you switch the "Control Level" to "Advanced".

3.) Switch to the "Strokes" tab and enable Strokes. That's it. Ignore the rest.

4.) Switch to the Distort tab and activate. Feel free to adjust the distortion until you're happy. I used for my example Displace = 6 and Noise Scale = 1200%

5.) Next we'll change the Color. Because we will set the line rendering to "Add" later on i recommend choosing colors which are a bit darker, they add up, remember ? The cool thing here is, that you're able to define how S&T will render the color. In my example it's "Along Stroke". I think it's pretty sweet because you can create cool FX.

6.) Opacity is your friend. At least when you render something in "Additive" mode :) Here are my settings. Again i used "Along Stroke". It really helps to sell it, if your lines disappear somehow :)

7.) Las but not least "Render" Tab. The most important part of this tutorial. Here we'll make the lines add up on rendering. Make sure to enable "Self-Blend" - Add and  "Blend" - Add. Theoretically you're set now :) Easy isn't it. But the output is nearly infinite. 

One last thing. The "The Rendersettings".  Just turn of Shading for Background and  Object. At least for this sort of style :) Oh and make sure to disable everything except Splines in the Lines Tab of the S&T Render Settings.

See a demo movie (old) of this technique here

Have fun playing with it and if you liked it tell your friends to sop by.

neosushi