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Freestyle and your feedback

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Few weeks ago, Blender NPR asked you, FreeStyle users on what you want to see improved in FreeStyle. Feedback was great. So what features FreeStylers are dying to have? Let’s have a glance.

In the interface side, the most popular feature is for freestyle to have its own button in the properties window. The main reason for that is freestyle menus are long and clogging the whole render section.

In the lineset and selection section, the overall voice is to have better selection that ignores excluded meshes from being calculated. Currently excluding a mesh only exclude it from rendering, but still included in view map construction. Major time loss there. Also intersection edge type also was brought up which was heavily discussed few months back in BlenderArtists forum.

In preset section, there were overwhelming supports to have human readable XML import and exportable function for linestyle and other freestyle settings.

Moving on to post processing section, a huge voice requesting FreeStyle render pass and node support independent of rendering engine. Plus fix for Z transparency for transparent objects.

In Rendering section all agrees to have FreeStyle multi treaded calculation. Also the ability to see RAM usage for possibility memory leakage and quit rendering button.

One thing we love to see but never happen is the discussion on how to make view map construction more efficient and use cases where it is crucial that view map can make or break a production. Alas this topic is very hidden even for experienced FreeStylers because of the lack of proper documentation on it. Few months back we actually asked T.K. on this topic, his reply was “Unless freestyle can be multi threaded and has enough speed, view map optimization will just be a back-burner.” We are still open to more input and open discussion.

You can view all of the suggestion made in the FreeStyle Users’ Improvement Suggestions Google doc.

Update: In the recent update in Freestyle development blog, T.K. mentioned a tiny intro about how FreeStyle calculation processes were done. Worth a look if you are trying to wrap your head around FreeStyle.