Wireframe Shader with No Tesselation

@brecht I’m sorry to bring this up, as perhaps it’s ranging on feature request, but I feel I should nonetheless. The wireframe node for Cycles currently tessellates the mesh. I have a post on RCS about this: RCS Post and in the comments I believe people more in the know about cycles had said that it was simply no trivial matter to stop the tessellation.

I have no doubt that may be the case, but I bring it up because I just finished a project that I would like to add to my demo reel. This is my first project I have done entirely in Blender. As is standard, I really need to show my wireframes, and have spent today trying to find the best way to do it. The tessellation from the wireframe node completely eliminates it from being an option, there is just not way around it.

A quick browse on forums and youtube will give the usual suggestions, being:

  • Viewport Render With Wireframe Overlay On
  • Wireframe Modifier
  • Freestyle
  • Wireframe Node in Shading

But each one of these comes with its pretty hefty downsides:

  • The viewport render is just too low resolution
  • The wireframe modifier adds immensely to the poly count, and is unwieldy if using linked collections. And if using the material override in view layer properties you are bound to 1 material
  • Freestyle on all edges cannot be applied to things that go through geometry nodes that would replace the mesh. Freestyle calculations on extremely heavy scenes are often so large that they cannot finish, and crash. If using linked collections one must go to the individual files and apply freestyle on all edges for each asset.
  • The wireframe node tessellates creates too much unneeded information and makes for ugly wireframe renders that professionals would never use.

As such, really, the easiest method is of course through shading, it eliminates all aforementioned issues with ease. Currently, the only way I can find to do this in Blender is to create a new UVmap, in the unwrap options reset said UV map, and then either use an image like this:
This
Or using a shading workaround like this:

This is as far as I know the only way to create truly high quality wireframes on the shading level. But this of course means I must make a new UV map and reset the UV’s on each and every single asset. The time that would have to be spent on that is dubious at best.

So I must ask, is there any intention of fixing this in the future? I understand it seems to be very difficult, but I really would argue that the fact that we have no easy access to wireframe renders severely limits those who want to show their work professionally.