Lobo3433 opened this issue on Dec 15, 2020 ยท 63 posts
LuxXeon posted Tue, 12 January 2021 at 12:05 AM
@Warlock279 Yeah, I think you're right about last summer. I posted a thread about them in June or July I think. I'm surprised you remembered that. Of course, it didn't take me this long to finish them. They were finished back then, but I put them aside until now to work on other projects.
Creating wireframe renders in Blender is a bit of a workaround really at this point. These buildings, for example, use the wireframe modifier with a unique material ID to create the profile outlines. This is why ngons came in handy. If I had used box modeling here, the wireframe modifier would have introduced a number of extraneous edges that I didn't want to show. There are different ways to mark edges so that modifiers don't affect them, but would have been quite a bit of extra work when it comes to 80 different objects. The only other way around this would have been to create a texture with UV's, but again that would have been extremely painstaking to do for 80 models individually.
Rendering quad wireframes in Blender is surprisingly convoluted compared to what I had been used to in 3dsmax. In Max, the wireframe override texture could be applied to all the objects in a scene at once, and it would render the quad topology, or isoline wires in the case of a subdivision model, with the option to include or exclude the hidden edges. Not so with Blender. The wireframe texture node in Blender has no option to exclude hidden edges, therefore forcing all wireframes to render out as triangulated topology. The only way around this is to use the wireframe modifier, which actually adds more geometry, and change the offset material to black or whatever color you want the wireframes to be.
The wireframe node will always only show the triangulated mesh because, according to the documentation, the functionality of the node is very rudimentary. It functions by blindly retrieving the mesh data from Cycles, and as with any render engine, all geometry is triangulated before being processed by Cycles. The node has no inputs, so there's no way to use math functions to avoid this. I'm sure a new wireframe node could be developed to show only quads, but so far they haven't bothered with creating this internally. I guess Blender users are just very used to creating wireframe previews with the wireframe modifier instead. I'll bet this will change now that more studios seem to have a growing interest in Blender.
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