The images on the following page were done with SketchUp and Piranesi. Could these be replicated with Blender and the GIMP or am I asking too much?
http://www.entouragearts.com/gallery02.asp
Yeah, easy. Just turn on “edge” in the render window to get the outlines, and the modeling is nothing hard (even I could do it) Obviously the textures could be done, they are quite terrible. (would actually be hard to bet them as bad as some of those.) The hand drawn effect may be hard though (maybe post processed)
I think you want the freestyle renderer. It was supposed to get integrated in blender, but there doesn’t seem to be much progress.
I think they are totally doable in Blender with at least some help from the Gimp, but it would probably demand a lot of work. Maybe not so much work “per image”, but achieving the desired effect should take some researching. I’m guessing(literally guessing) that once you got the hang of the process, it would be much trouble to achieve that “sketchy” look.
(although I totally understand it in a non-rational level, it still amuses how people go tohrough all that trouble to make a 3D model, and then complicate themselves a little more to make it look as if it was handmade… of course, in my case at least, I couldn’t do it by hand… but that just me)
Not only is it possible, Virilata wrote a couple of tutorials on how to make the sketchup line drawing effect, and how to make the crosshatches. It shouldn’t be too hard to modify it to do colored crosshatches.
maybe with nodes.
maybe with a little programming ;-p