LANPR/Line Art, how to test?

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Where do I find information about Line Art in Blender?

(Note, Freestyle/LANPR were easy to search for, “line art”, while perhaps a more human readable name, is near impossible to find anything on…)

I wish to investigate if Blender can be used to produce user guide documentation illustrations of products imported from CAD (translated via 3DM/Datasmith).

Freestyle had many options, but they were confusing and difficult to get a good result from. My hope is that this new feature will be better, but currently, I don’t even know how to test it, and I have some heavy duty test cases I can throw at it:

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I am not sure if I am right but isn’t there the LANPR branch for this?

Or do you mean this?

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Here is where I got that LANPR is going to be renamed to the generic “line art” name, and here is where I got that this is a replacement for Freestyle.

The Gumroad link seems to be a shader, but I’m not interested in rasterized outlines, only SVG vector output.

The other link seems to imply that it’s a part of 2.91? Thanks, I’ll check that thread and see if I can find more information!

EDIT: Judging from the thread, it’s still suuuper early. So, I guess no use in attempting to throw a 300mb file with hundreds of objects and millions of polygons (all with custom normals) on it…

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AFAIK lanpr (lineart) Blender branch is actually in WIP stage and it will not land in 2.91, i can think we see it in 2.92 if his code will be review and eventually fixed before no new feature development stage of 2.92

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this is the current status:
https://developer.blender.org/D5442

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or click here to read latest note of Yiming on LineArt develpment

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Here is the direct link to the new diff: https://developer.blender.org/D8758
(Can also be found from the development log link)

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Thanks for the replies, but I’m not a developer and can not build an executable myself.

Is there anyone doing nightly builds somewhere with this functionality included? (Although without a tutorial, which I guess it’s too early for, I probably won’t be able to figure anything out anyway.)

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Don’t know about your OS, @icappiello built a macOS DMG recently.
You may also build it yourself, https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Building_Blender the process is hiccough-free mostly.

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You can find Blender LineArt compiled for all OS in GraphicAll ( https://blender.community GraphicAll )

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Thanks! First test… not unexpected, but not very good results:

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But I’m hoping I’m coming in early enough here that the developers will see this and hopefully see that there are people out there who wants to use this for other things than cartoons.

(Btw, the model cannot be shared fully, but parts of it can be shared with a known Blender developer if there’s a signed NDA in place.)

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This result is corresponding to GP strokes intersecting with the mesh.

You just have to enable In Front option in properties of GP Object to obtain a decent result.

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I don’t see that option:

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image406×1114 52.3 KB

Also, stroke thickness doesn’t seem to work… it’s super thick even if I switch to screen space and adjust the pixel thickness (two settings which feel as if they belong together, but are very far apart as you can see in the screenshot above). I’m using a build from 9/30 so maybe its broken in that version?

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immagine
immagine1427×788 281 KB

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Thanks, now I found the “in front” and it works.

The stroke thickness, however, does nothing, regardless of whether screen space or world space is selected. The only thing that can affect the thickness for me is reducing the thickness scale.

But when I do, I’m actually impressed by the results:

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image1720×960 364 KB

Now, I’m apparently not allowed to post screenshots from commercial software on this forum anymore, but if I could, you would see that it’s actually pretty close! And that’s semi-expensive software from one of the largest CAD vendors in the world.

Now, the render time per frame in the above screenshot is about 10-15 seconds… so not really real-time. :slight_smile:

For the future, to make this a contender (and it’s getting close now):

  • A setting to only calculate the lines when you hit render
  • Have the line calculation not fill in the Blender icon in the taskbar, but rather use the Blender status bar progress bar instead
  • Different line thickness on the silhouette of an object
  • An easy way to export the lines to SVG (while exporting the underlying render to png)

:+1:

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