1

I'm struggling to model my objects into a 90's retro vector style, with the wireframe and low poly look.

Freestyle won't render in a game mode, and it seems to use a tremendous amount of time just to render simple black outlines around my mesh faces.

It seems if I create two materials, one as "wire" and the other as a surface - it does the trick, however it's only 1 pixel thick, and seems to get lost. When I pan around different angles, the matte material seems to take over the wireframe material.

Does anyone know how to modify the thickness of that wire attribute in the materials?

enter image description here

I don't want to create a whole different mesh object for the wireframe effect, that the blender previewer seems to handle gracefully by default in preview mode. The render animation seems to do a whole lot of extra work to render frames, and all I want is a retro 90's cartoon, and possibly do something in simulator / game mode.

Ray Mairlot
  • 29,192
  • 11
  • 103
  • 125
DrStein99
  • 113
  • 2
  • 6
  • I presume you're using the Blender Internal renderer and not Cycles? – Ray Mairlot Nov 26 '15 at 18:21
  • Yes. Cycles seems to take forever to render. I'm not producing a video for Skywalker ranch, I just to make a low-poly cartoon that looks like a 90's video game. – DrStein99 Nov 29 '15 at 08:20

2 Answers2

1

Apart the Z offset setting shown in another answer, there are at least other 2 ways to render that wireframe: freestyle and wireframe modifier.

The first draws stylized lines over the resulting object after all rendering finish. You can customize the lines styles and where to apply them, like:

enter image description here

The second method can be used with two copies of the object: one gets the usual colored material, the other has the wireframe modifier, and gets another material just for the wire mesh to display, and you have some degree of editing for the wireframe "style"

enter image description here

here you see how the wireframe is really a separate object, I scaled it up a bit... enter image description here

m.ardito
  • 11,967
  • 2
  • 23
  • 36
  • Thanks for the response. The freestyle mode doesn't seem to render in game engine, and creating separate objects for the model might be too much. I'm creating a model of my entire town with houses and seems like too much information for it to process. – DrStein99 Nov 29 '15 at 23:21
0

Increase the Z offset on your wireframe material slot. I have the monkey here set up with all vertexes duplicated and the duplicates on the second material slot.

enter image description here

Basically, this moves all of the vertices in the second material slot 1 meter closer to the camera. This keeps them from Z-fighting with the main material. This should let you get the effect you want.

Spencer Brown
  • 934
  • 4
  • 9