StrokeGen - A revolutional 3D line art renderer for Blender

Hi, I’m here to introduce something I’ve worked on for 6 years - a 3D renderer that generates stylized line art from your 3D scenes.

I can’t post videos here,e but you can check them out at
https://x.com/jwtstone/status/1863465793377464665

And this is the thread in developer forum
StrokeGen - A Realtime 3D line art renderer: Info & Feedback - Contributing to Blender - Developer Forum

It handles many objects, each with millions of vertices, in real-time.
This is the first line art renderer that can do this, with equal or even better quality to its alternatives(freestyle, pencil+4)

Here are some screenshots that I made myself:
Stylized curves

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Scene with heavy geometries

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Curve topology

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Looks great! Its nice to see something with the promise of being able to handle a lot of topology. I’ll give it a try when I have time.
Keep up the good work!
(Also maybe post a direct link to where people can download the latest version of this)

Quick first test - it looks like having a subdivision modifier on the object makes it quite unhappy.

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Where did you download this?

Initial thoughts:

It’s a interesting proof-of-concept, in terms of it does draw ink lines far faster in real time than grease pencil.

It’s hard to make a comparison to the speed of Pencil+, as the appearance of lines I’m getting is quite different. What I mean by this is that Pencil+ produces production-quality ink, while at the moment I’ve not yet found this with StrokeGen. So - while the speed is good, the result isn’t as good.

I wasn’t able to ink instances created with geometry nodes; perhaps theres some different requried setup involved, but I believe that would need to be addressed - as, modifying all my geonode setups in order to StrokeGen the objects, is not something most people will be willing to do. It also needs to be able to do this, without requiring the geonodes be converted from Instance to Real.

The overall assignment and management of strokes is currently on an object+material basis. When I imagine trying to assign strokes on one of my regular scenes in that manner (one by one, multiple property clicks per object) - my mind immediately thinks “No, I’m not going to do that.” One thing that Pencil+ does quite well in this regard is that it has it’s own management system:

Within that, I can just select 100 objects in my scene, open Pencil+, and instantly assign them to be inked. Or multiple materials, if desired.

So ultimately, I think Strokegen will need some sort of overall management system to deal with assignments. (And, hopefully does not utilize blender’s Collections feature as a quick - but suboptimal - solution.)

I won’t get into things like intersecting lines, edge assignments etc - as it’s already known that such things are on the planning board to be added, if/when development continues. Obviously those would be important to the artist.

I do think it’s a project worth developing, and will continue to follow the progress in the future. :slight_smile:

@joseph

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Thanks for the considerate comments.

About comparison to Pencil4.
The core algorithm of StrokeGen is much faster than that in Pencil+4. And if you observe the curve topology (mark each curve with different colors), you’ll find StrokeGen outputs similar or cleaner curves.

About the UI layout.
I agree that it should be re-designed, and I am working on it. If you are interested for further feedback pls join our Discord :wink:

Pls note that StrokeGen is developed by a single developer, and it’s free.

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I’ve been wanting Pencil+, but it’s absurdly priced. If you can get StrokeGen to 75% of the level of functionality and interface of Pencil+, I will happily pay 50 dollars for it, if you want. Keep up the good work

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In my experience, developing an industrial inking renderer is the same difficulty as making a production-level ray tracer. I admire Psoft’s efforts in Pencil+—they worked for decades to refine it.
So… I think the price is fair?

StrokeGen has a different goal than Pencil+4; it mainly targets real-time rendering. I hope it can finally be used in games.

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have you tested any of the updated versions?

I have not, no.