Blender 2.70 is AWESOME!

Even though Blender 2.70 is not officially released yet, I got to try out a test build.

The freestyle component in the later versions of Blender had major problems handling mesh data that exceeded 30 or so thousand polys (my characters are around 2 million +).  Needless to say it never rendered the characters fully and crashed the program.

With the latest build though I heard that freestyle had its code reworked, and now it works like a charm!  Still takes a long time to render.  But the results are worth it!

Just in case your not familiar with freestyle, to put it simply it draws lines around the character silhouette and other areas that may be defined by the user.  It's pretty much essential to get that traditional anime look on your rendered models.

This is an older version of the Heroin that I'm still trying to find the time to finish.  Some of the gear has been changed around a bit.  The purpose of  this scene and setup was just a quick test I did to check proportions and see how well the character moved with the equipment I made pretty much entirely from imagination.  And how it would look in a setting.  Some of the parts are messed up, most notably on the inner thigh where the under-armor clips though the leg.

I could have done one with the more recent modification but I just wanted to benchmark the new freestyle code myself.  And I have to say I'm impressed!  


EDIT:Some minor grammatical corrections.