Weekly update October 18-24

In addition to the support for line caps, a set of GUI elements for dashed line was introduced in the Strokes panel of the Freestyle Line Style tab.

By enabling the Dashed Line toggle button, you can specify three pairs of dash and gap lengths in the unit of pixels.  Dash values define the lengths of dash strokes, while gap values specify intervals between two dashes.  If a zero gap is specified, then the corresponding dash is ignored even if it has a non-zero value.  Dashes are treated as separate strokes, meaning that you can apply line caps, as well as color, alpha and thickness modifiers.  The image below shows a few examples of dashed lines on the default cube.

Panel (a) shows simple dashed lines along hidden edges.  Panel (b) shows an example of dashed lines defined by two dash-gap pairs.  Panels (c) and (d) illustrate dashes with round caps.  Panels (e) and (f) are results of Along Stroke thickness modifiers applied to dashed lines.

Weekly update September 22-October 17

In the last blog post, we discussed how the complexity of internal stroke representations may increase when line joins, line caps and extreme thickness are taken into account.  After that, in the BlenderArtists Freestyle thread a separate discussion took place about Python scripting for implementing line caps.  This reminded the dev team that the implementation of different line caps is not that difficult and can be done independently of the other two issues of line joins and extreme thickness.  Hence, a new set of options for controlling the line caps has been added as shown in the screenshot below:

The Strokes panel of the Freestyle Line Style tab now allows you to use three types of line caps: Butt (flat), Round (half-circle), and Square (flat and extended).  See the following example images for each type of line caps.

  

Another small addition to the Strokes panel is the Same Object option.  By default, feature edges from different objects may be connected to form a stroke.  The Same Object option alters this default chaining rule, requesting that feature edges be connected only when they belong to the same object.