Wireframe Render Pass
A geometry wire pass would be extremely useful for both modelers creating a demo reel to show off topology and special effects artists looking to creating modern geometric effects. Currently, the process to create a wire overlay render is quite tedious.
The idea is fairly self explanatory, but I put together a mock-up to show an ideal result. A wire render layer could render what would be seen in the wire frame view, and the hidden wire pass could render what would be seen if faces occluded the wires.
5 Comments
I came to this site to request something similar. I love the way the wireframe overlays look in 2.8. I was thinking maybe the wireframe node could be revisited to allow rendering wireframes with options since it shows faces as tris currently.
and make it sensible with subsurf's optimal display :3
The hidden wire pass would be easy to implement, the transparent one not so much - the ray would have to continue forward if it hit the interior of a face, but then the regular combined pass would be wrong. Generally, though, afaics this is a classic use case for render layers - add a second layer, set the material override to a wireframe material (either wireframe->emission for the hidden wire case or wireframe as the mix between transparent and emission for the transparent wire case) and combine the passes in the compositor.
Transparent wire would be really simple to do from a viewport render, so I guess it's not really needed since the use case for it would be really small.
Hidden wire, however, would be amazing. It's totally possible to do it with a separate render layer, but as you can see in this 20 minute video, it's quite a process to get the best results: cgcookie.com/tutorial/rendering-a-wireframe-overlay/
I don't think it's a huge priority, but I just wanted to put it on the wish list :)
that would be very interesting