Grease Pencil v Freestyle

Support Lighting and Rendering
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OK, here’s my problem. Long time 3D user (like, since C4D V4 on Amiga), and Blender exclusively for maybe 7 or 8 years. But I have always been aiming for photorealism. Recently, I want to do, or at least play with more cartoon stuff. And I’m there, by and large. I can get cell shading, using the EV ShadertoRGB node, or the cycles toon shader. What I’m after is the drawing outine.

Now, using freestyle, I can get a decent looking, hand drawn render, but hell, it’s slow. (Render that for the geometry takes 2 seconds, spends another 30 seconds on the freestyle).

I can use grease pencil, which is an order of magnitude faster (1/10 render time), but then there’s some stuff I can’t (or don’t know how to) do.

Specifically, fading strokes towards the end, as though the hand drawing has started to lift.

I can do it in the painfully slow freestyle, but can’t figure out how to do it in the much faster grease pencil.

I’ll post a link to a test of the differences, when I put it together.

Also, Freestyle is hugely memory intensive. I have one scene, that will literally destroy my 128Gb RAM trying to render freestyle (with nothing more than a plain white emission shader on the objects), so there’s another reason to try to replicate the look with grease pencil (still on my “to do” test of grease pencil).

OK - here are the comparisons. Two versions of the same scene, the first of each being freestyle, and the second using grease pencil. It is most noticable on the “outline” render that it doesn’t look hand drawn.

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I think you should be able to recreate what you have in freestyle with GP by using additional modifiers after the lineart modifier.

E.g. for this you can use the Opacity and Thickness modifiers which both have an option to use a custom curve to define the value along the stroke.
Together with a Noise modifier you should be able to get very close to your freestyle result.

lineart with modifiers
lineart with modifiers1978×1687 250 KB

The Subdivision modifier is used because that scene is using very simple geometry that otherwise wouldn’t really show the variation of the noise.

In Blender 4.3 you can also use a Geometry Nodes modifier which supports Grese Pencil now and gives you much more freedom to manipulate the strokes, if you want to go down that rabbit hole.

Hope that helps! :slight_smile:

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Thank you. I didn’t even notice all of the special modifiers.

Like I said - complete GP novice. Time to play.

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I’ve been going down the Freestyle and Grease Pencil rabbit hole. As @lone_noel said you can get a hand drawn look with GP by using some modifiers. The problem with GP is it jitters a bit more with camera movement than Freestyle. This Geometry Nodes set up from Tradigitalist is similar to Grease Pencil as it is based on camera rays, but creates actual Mesh data instead of Line Art. It has some built in settings to add a hand drawn look and renders cleaner than Grease Pencil with camera movement. Might be worth taking a look at.

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Thank you, I’ll give it a look. For now, I’ve made GP work, and I’m not so sure how much I’ll need this. I tend to go for photorealistic as a rule, but sometimes, you just gotta break your flow.