Workflow: Clean Line Art

Question

I know there on some talented Blender user on here, and I have been looking for methods with Blender Eevee to make clean line art like the work of @beesandbombs on Twitter:

Unfortunately, I have been stumped with the line rendering part of this:

I have been using freestyle in Eevee, and I can't seem to make the lines look, well, good. They look very pixelated and inconsistent.

Here's a close up of the reference and mine:

Here's my .blend so far (really doubt this would help anyone that can offer advice). I would appreciate any guidance on workflow for this!

Answer 1

There are quite a few aspects of your .blend which might defeat he clean render of Freestyle strokes.

• The Geometry of your object. Maybe you created the top face by extruding edges, not faces? The inside is packed with internal faces. They all have to go, really, there's a danger of depth-errors. Just leave the outside skin.
• The Material of your object. No need for Principled BSDF here.. you don't want to simulate the response of the surface to light at all. Just use an Emission, which, in EEVEE, is flat color.
• The Render settings. Viewport 'Sampling' was set to 16, but Render was set to 1. With only 1 sample per pixel, there's no anti-aliasing. 16 seems to be enough.
• Freestyle's Line Set settings. You were relying on the 'Visible' setting alone to determine which edges are stroked. I'm surprised that works at all. Maybe it's the internal faces. :). Instead, in this case, it would seem to be best to explicitly tell Freestyle which edges to render, by marking them as Freestyle Edges. Then in the View Layers tab, Freestyle > Line Set panel, set Freestyle to pick up only those edges:

After that, the render's looking OK:

You can find a revised version of your file here

All credit to @beesandbombs for a lovely idea.. I couldn't resist implementing it in Geometry Nodes: