Add-on for wire renders with Blender internal and Cycles
A wire render has a lot of uses in architectural visualization and most of them involve the demonstration of the structure of a 3d model for other artists. I ask all my students to produce a wire render of their 3d models to evaluate their work. In Blender we have to create a setup of two objects in order to create a wire Render, giving to one of the objects a material with the wire type selected, and adjust the wire with the Z Offset parameter. This works really well, but demands some work to setup all materials and to create the duplicates of the objects.
An add-on called Setup Wire Materials can speed up the process! The add-on was created by an artist called liero and is available to download at this thread in the Blenderartists forums.
The Add-on is quite simple to use, and for those of you that want a preview of how the add-on works, the video is a nice overview of the Add-on.
Rendering wires in Cycles
As a plus, the Add-on can create a duplicate of any 3d model, based on the wire structure. Why? The same workaround to render wires with the Blender internal render doesn’t work on Cycles. To be able to render wires in Cycles, an option called Create Wire Object of the add-on creates a polygonal copy of any object, using their edges to build a new object. This way we can see wire renders on Cycles. But, be aware that this process is really slow, and can demand some time, especially with dense meshes.
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I’m opting for an OpenGL render in a Gimp layer set to Multiply on top of the actual render.
Very easy, very fast.
Furthermore, this also clearly shows the various types of edges used. Crease, Bevel Weights, Seams, Sharp, Face/Vertex Normals, if you want.
Just hit Display Properties (N) –> Display –> Only Render first to get rid of the grid floor and so on…