The Freestyle SVG Exporter page in the manual shows this image: but doesn't really have any indication of how to achieve this contour line look...
I did some more digging around and found an article from 6 year ago with a similar image, that had a very similar picture and provided a script, which I've yet to try (haven't messed with scripts in blender yet...):
Is there a more "official" way of achieving this? I know e.g. Rhino3D has contour line command so I'm wondering if blender has anything similar?
edit: I want to render the scene as an svg, should have specified. I got the script to work, but it's destructive... it operates on the mesh directly unfortunately. If anyone can find a way around this would be helpful.