StrokeGen, a real-time line art renderer for Blender, is open for testing. We’ve shown you a glimpse of its work before, and now it’s time to try it out yourself.
Its creator Wangziwei Jiang’s exploration of NPR techniques has led to the tool finally being ready for users to generate high-quality feature curves from 3D surfaces in beta.
“Given an input mesh, StrokeGen traces 3D feature curves and then resamples them to 2D curves.
It currently only supports contour curves, but in the future, more feature curves, such as boundary, intersection, crease can be supported.”
Jiang describes two stages of the renderer’s work:
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Per-object phase:
Iterate through each mesh object, collecting its vertices, faces, and edges. Convert the mesh into a GPU-friendly representation. Dispatch massive parallel GPU kernels to remesh/tessellate/analyze the surface. Finally, generate the feature curves. -
Per-feature-curve phase:
After all feature curves are generated, the renderer batches them together for further processing and resamples them to 2D curves.
Then, the line art style will be applied to the 2D curves and rendered on the screen.
Two methods are supported when rendering the curves: stamping and stroking. The former is similar to brushed drawings in Photoshop, and the latter is identical to vectorized curves in Adobe Illustrator.
StrokeGen Beta 1.0 is available here. Follow the creator on X/Twitter and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
