Now that Blender has Grease pencil and line art, does Freestyle have any reason to exist?
Just wondering.
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Yes. Because it does not offer the same way of strokes creation and the same kind of stylization.
Freestyle can create strokes from suggestive contours. By default, that setting produces a mess.
But advanced settings (Sphere Radius and Kr Derivative Epsilon) used to choose pertinent lines and combined with a range to select strokes of pertinent length, that can be a lot more efficient for Organic Shapes than Line Art modifier limited to Crease value and Marked Edges or Faces.
This is also the case for Ridge & Valley setting.
This is complicated to obtain pertinent strokes on wrinkles of a cloth from a Line Art modifier.
That is not as difficult with Freestyle’s suggestive contours, ridges & valleys.
http://freestyle.sourceforge.net/GALLERY/RENAISSANCE/virgin.php
Freestyle have a lot of modifiers to tweak geometry offsets, thickness or colors.
And they are really simple to use and understand.
Grease Pencil has no equivalent to Curvature 3D or Tangent modifiers.
Custom Curve subpanels of GP modifiers are equivalent to Along Stroke Freestyle’s modifier.
It is also possible to use a vertex group modified by a Weight Proximity modifier to influence a GP modifier. But it is a lot more complicated set-up than just adding a Distance from Object or Distance from Camera Freestyle’s modifier.
Freestyle can also create UVmapped textures that have a pattern for end caps different than principal pattern.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/freestyle/view_layer/line_style/texture.html#example
GP lines can not be customized that way.
Line Art was greatly improved and stylization by modifiers made progress in Blender 3.0.
It is probably covering 90 % of NPR uses of technical stuff renders.
But for organic stuff, you may still prefer to use Freestyle than drawing by hand each GP line wanted.
In a near future, it will probably be possible to automatically create any required GP line using geometry nodes.
But for the moment, GP and GN stuff are not mature enough to be as easy to use as Freestyle for some cases.
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I went through each of the parameters in this masterclass so you can learn how to use them in regards of animation and still frames:
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Is it fair to say that freestyle will be removed when Lineart/grease pencil gets more complete?
Not really.
Currently Line Art modifier is using Freestyle Edges and Freestyle Faces.
Freestyle pass is a part of compositing and rendering stuff.
So, removing Freestyle has to be done carefully to avoid to create issues with regular rendering stuff.
It took a lot of time to remove Blender Internal. But it was a bigger part that was a lot more intertwined with the rest of software.
Freestyle Edges and Faces could become some kind of attributes independent of Freestyle.
If we have another system to automatically produce GP lines on organic shapes, and if the system would be easier to create some styles ; conditions would be fulfil to only use Line Art and GP.
But that does not mean that Freestyle could be removed instantly.
There would be work to do about the code, but also to prepare community.
You would have to warn Freestyle users that Freestyle would be discontinued, help them to modify their pipeline and let them the time to do it.
Currently, developers did not announce an intention to remove Freestyle.
They announced a replacement at beginning of LANPR project.
When LANPR did not pass the cut as a renderer and was converted into Line Art modifier, that stopped to be an imminent target.
yes, i’m using it for my graphic novel.
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My question was not about popularity.
I was wondering if it’s getting slowly replaced, or whether it’s too different of a thing that both systems will coexist always. I never used freestyle or Line art, so I don’t know much about them, except that they are both used to display models as stylised line art. I might use one or the other in the future.
So far, as I understood, Freestyle will be replaced, but not any time soon. The transition will be very slow.