Since Blender 2.48 I remember there was a “Wire” mode for materials. Now it is gone. Why? Why do you keep doing this to me?
I don’t need any fancy depth-sensitive cool looking wireframe renders, I just want to render a line connecting two vertices.
How?
Can you just use the modifier?
No, try it yourself to see why
Depends on whether you need pixel-constant size or not. Since coolest BI’s constant wire material is gone for 2.8, best option now is wire OpenGL render + compositing. Wireframe node is pretty useless due to triangulation. Otherwise use wireframe modifier
The thing is these modifiers expect a mesh, while I’m using edges only.
Before 2.8 Blender was even pretty good for 2D CAD drawings, I used it a lot professionally.
In that case I think the best option is to convert it into a spline and render it.
Maybe this helps
You can try duplivert approach: high density edges via subdiv modifiers + plane instanced across verts. Planes are always faced to camera through Track-to constraint. Since they are duplis setup is pretty memory efficient.
Payed plugin to get back functionality, great…
It doesn’t seem to mention whether edge rendering is supported.
Thanks but I’m probably not going to do this regularly, it’s several steps and changing the model geometry just to do something trivial.
What do you mean? Curves aren’t rendered either. What spline do you mean?
In the Object Data Property panel of a curve you can go to
Geometry -> Extrude
Geometry -> Bevel
and extrude and bevel with a very low value and you get your wireframe.
If you have to do that often it would make sense to automate it with a script.
This is thickness-to-view-dependent but I’m marking it as solution as it seems there’s no ideal solution anymore.
Seems like Blender dun goofed again and I’ll be keeping 2.79 too for CAD work…
