I’d love to see this in master even if it was the only goal of GSoC this year. It’s good as it is now (well, some UI polish wouldn’t hurt…), but I’m afraid that this could have the fate as many other projects which disappeared.
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I just had a brief discussion with Ton on IRC, there might be some chance if at least one animation studio would like to try use this. After all LANPR needs actual production environment to test.
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It’s a great plan imo .suggestion; What would be very awesome would be to have Dpix display along/inside Eevee,so artists could texture paint the shading or tweak the materials while seeing the lineart with colors before rendering. Making Ui more intuitive is a great plan and I can’t wait to have the missing basic Ui elements that Lanpr make disappear like shapekeys and other tabs that are missing. Better antialiasing would be great too to reach Pencil+ level quality at render. Anyway,can’t wait to see what will come up with,its gonna be a very exciting soc.
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I did the unthinkable and installed Winblows to test this puppy, loving it so far, but I run into freaky renders, looks great in real-time DPIX, but as soon as I push the render button, I get funky results !
The GSOC plan looks good, but Christian has some good suggestions !
fiddle with “clip start” value in camera panel
Freestyle was a development branch next to master between years before being integrated.
As long as there is a developer motivated by maintaining the project, there is no reason to feel that way.
There is a part of community using Freestyle in production. Same people will have interest in LANPR.
And nowadays, many people who come to blender because of 2.8 Grease Pencil will probably be interested in a fast NPR render engine, too.
Well. It looks like main mesh is not rendered at all.
It may have nothing to do with renderer and may simply be a deactivation of rendering of the object in outliner.
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I am wearing the cone of shame right now, it was just that, thanks man ! 
I cant get access to many setting in LANPR mode, like the camera settings, I need to go back to either Cycles or Eevee mode to access them, is this normal, or am I missing something here?
Yes.
As Freestyle, LANPR render should be easily composited with an EEVEE or a Cycles render.
But contrary to Freestyle after BI removal, it should be possible to see its render in 3D View.
LANPR comes up as a GSOC when 2.8 UI fundamentals were not established.
Render Engine choice was moving from Topbar to Properties Editor. Viewport modes were under discussion. Renderlayer Tab was not really defined and Ouput tab was not created, yet.
So, a better UI is required for LANPR. It is one reason why proposal for this year’s GSOC is talking about making a more intuitive UI.
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Personally my interest in LANPR is to use it next to Grease Pencil. Mainly to quickly render the big shapes in backgrounds, enhanced with grease pencil objects to add the details. As well, it could be very useful for more complex objects that can’t easily be drawn in 2D every frame, such as machines and complex vehicles. I gave the current branch a build to give it a try, but I’m quickly encountering a critical issue:
Blender has the potential to completely overhaul the current standard in 2D animation, because of how powerful compositing 2D drawings in 3D space is. The one big lacking tool right now however, is a good pipeline for backgrounds that works within that system of 3D-first. I’ve seen people either settle on using a different style for backgrounds and background objects, which limits stylistic options since anything Grease Pencil on top looks out of place. Or, rotoscope the background in Grease Pencil over 3D objects, which in my opinion this defeats the point of having a powerful 3D editor.
NPR line rendering has the potential to form the basis for this background pipeline, but both Freestyle and LANPR are right now a pain to mix with Grease Pencil. Freestyle renders lines on top of Grease Pencil objects, while currently LANPR has the above issue.
I would love to see some more attention being given in NPR rendering to complementing 2D animation, rather than trying to completely replace it.
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There is no tentative to replace 2D animation with NPR rendering.
In blender, the newcomer is 2D animation. The work done on LANPR for the moment just consist in obtaining Non Photorealistic Rendering of 3D objects.
The compositing of 2D elements and 3D elements can only happen afterwards.
To do so, you need to obtain a correct rendering of 3D objects, first.
Technically speaking, LANPR does no distinction between a 3D object used as a prop in a landscape and a 3D object used as a part of a character.
Cycles is a renderer. EEVEE is a renderer. Freestyle is a renderer. LANPR is a renderer.
And to obtain wanted result, Blender is mixing 2 renders. First Cycles render is done, then, Freestyle one and eventually Freestyle render is added above Cycles render.
Yes. LANPR could take into account GP objects as mask to ignore creation of some part of lines.
But first, we need a LANPR that don’t make mistakes and is able to render correct lines corresponding to objects seen from camera point of view and respecting variations of style defined by user.
To report the fact that Freestyle should take into account Grease Pencil objects or that View Layer tab does not provide a Freestyle pass, you probably should mention that on devtalk.blender.org .
To clarify, I’m not implying LANPR (or Freestyle) are attempting to replace 2D animation as a whole, rather I’m talking about those features frequently being viewed at from a complete-CG perspective.
I think it’s valuable to also consider the perspective where someone may, for example, draw the characters in 2D while using CG for other elements. In my opinion a feature should be tested and developed in the contexts it’s going to be used in rather than in isolation, and the thread is asking for opinions on Freestyle and what is good or bad about it.
Grease Pencil is indeed an extremely new addition to Blender’s capabilities, and I’m very excited for the possibilities it opens up. If LANPR can complement it extremely well, this will increase interest in Blender, Grease Pencil, and LANPR overall.
This is true, but you also have to consider the fact that this work is being done within a limited time-frame and by one developer. He has only three months during each google summer of code to complete a project. It is more productive for him to work towards finalizing the more fundamental features of lanpr, then to try to cover interoperatbility between it and the new grease pencil stuff Antonio Vazquez has been working on.
There will be time after both the new grease pencil and lanpr systems are complete for the developers to build features that make those systems work better together.
Hey @xp8110
Quick question: is the latest LANPR Build located at:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=!AAM_qn1at2hFHOo&id=8F3B68A0268ED641!5166&cid=8F3B68A0268ED641
Still no Linux release ?
I might have a look at compiling it, haven’t done that in a while !
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Hey, I’m glad to see how far this project has gone! I see people asking about .svg export, but I have a different suggestion: would it be possible to bake the lines into Grease Pencil strokes? Or curves (if the data is handled as Bezier splines)? I think this would make it possible for LANPR to save itself some work and run even faster. Thanks.
Also, good luck for this year’s GSOC!
I did not read the thread, so I am little informed about progress …
I quickly ask a question to those of you who are informed …
what currently prevents it from being implemented in the master branch?
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It is at its early state. Not enough tested to be judged as enough reliable.
It lacks a little bit of customization of lines that its developer plan to add during next GSOC.
And its current UI and workflow was made without guidance, because of 2.8 not being well-defined last summer.
Currently, it is a separated renderer with no setting under Render Tab, everything under Scene tab.
Although it will have to be available in completion of EEVEE or Cycles, presentation of LANPR could be more smooth and more intuitive before attempting a merge in master.
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a new build was released:
https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=!AAM_qn1at2hFHOo&id=8F3B68A0268ED641!5166&cid=8F3B68A0268ED641
With a facebook discussion thread:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/BNPRandFreestyle/permalink/2322842677738822/?comment_tracking={"tn"%3A"O"}
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It would be good to have better version filename structure. Without the timestamps on OneDrive, I wouldn’t know which is the latest build or for which OS.
Github would help with this.