So I came across this post about a new native method to render to SVG. That sounds great and all but how can it actually be done? Which buttons give me an SVG file at the end and where are they?
It seems pretty common for many blender/gimp plugins to simply not say how to use them. Even if the installation goes fine, there's no mechanism to find out what new buttons or menus exist.
Similar questions:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?282824-SVG-output-script
Install via File->Preferences->Addons->Install From File...
Couldn't find any menu additions trying to add this to recent blender versions, but pretty sure I had it working in the past.
https://github.com/hvfrancesco/freestylesvg
Check Freestyle in the Render tab of the Properties window (bottom right). In the Render Layers tab, change Frestyle->Control Mode to Python Scripting Mode and load one of the scripts from the link. The blender file must be saved for this to work and then the SVG just appears in the output directory (or maybe the same dir as .blend, I've forgotten) after rendering.
The latest blender in fedora 21 doesn't have this addon, it's pretty new. Rather than find a recent binary build I just compiled from the source. Checking out the blender repository also gets the addon scripts. The one in question is release/scripts/addons/render_freestyle_svg.py. Hopefully this'll make it into the stable releases soon.
This addon needs to be enabled via File->Preferences->Addons (search for and check "Render: Freestyle SVG Exporter"). With this enabled, an additional section appears below Freestyle called Freestyle SVG Export in the Render tab of Properties (bottom left). Check this, and next time you render, a file will simply appear in the output directory. By default the output directory is /tmp/ and my render was /tmp/0001.svg.
It's possible to convert your mesh to a grease Pencil first and then export as SVG.
Object -> Convert -> Grease Pencil
Then
File -> Export -> Grease Pencil as SVG
