Real-Time Blender Line Art Renderer For Mesh Contours

Wangziwei Jiang has spent a few years exploring NPR techniques for generating stroke curves, which are essential for expressive line drawings, with the goal of rendering dynamic line animations in real-time.

In 2022, they presented StrokeGen source code and the paper GPU-Driven Real-Time Mesh Contour Vectorization, marking a significant advancement in real-time NPR. This fully GPU-driven method is the first to enable real-time curve generation from 3D mesh contours.

According to Wangziwei Jiang, it's up to 800 times faster than existing outline rendering methods like Freestyle and Line Art in Blender while achieving comparable visual results, and the proposed parallel algorithms could also have broader applications.

While StrokeGen was a research prototype developed in Unity, Wangziwei Jiang plans for it to be included in the official Blender code. For now, they are working independently on a customized Blender build with modified source code.

Written in C++ and GLSL, this render engine is similar to Eevee or Grease Pencil. It allows for deep integration into Blender rather than relying on the Python layer or visual nodes.

Currently, the system supports per-object parameters, and Wangziwei Jiang is considering supporting multiple sets of curves with varying styles for each object. The developer also noted that output to Geometry Nodes might be possible in the future.

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