This week we addressed two issues in the Freestyle branch. One issue was concerned with the so-called background mode that was enabled by the “-b” command-line option, which led to an immediate crash of the program. Now that the issue has been addressed, you can render Freestyle-based still images and animation through Blender’s command-line interface. The other issue was related to undo. You may have observed that Blender abnormally terminates once in a while when you have canceled some editing operations by undoing. An attempt to fix this issue was made and now the branch should be more stable than ever.

As you can see with our discussion on the bf-committers mailing list, we are preparing for the merge. We first have to bring the 2.5 branch codebase into our branch, before we can merge them the changes into 2.5 trunk. Brecht will then help get RNA configured for Freestyle.

The render of the week is an animation movie by Mark Cannon (pyrosever). The render is based on a thoroughly rigged model of a tank. Thin brush strokes by Freestyle were put on top of well-textured solid faces, resulting in a sophisticated look. The movie clip on YouTube shows the tank in action — don’t miss the awesome movements of the continuous tracks (catapillars). Thank you pyrosever for sharing the nice results with all of us!