In anticipation of Freestyle support for Cycles in Blender 2.72, Tamito Kajiyama had a quick talk with us about his work on the integration and also shared the exciting preview render above(The model data courtesy of Kuroyu). See what he had to say about the targets for Freestyle for 2.72 and beyond:

Blender Nation: We know Blender 2.72 was the target for Freestyle for Cycles, will this target be met?

Tamito: Yes, Freestyle line rendering for Cycles is waiting for code review as of this writing (although the Blender development has moved to BCon3, that is, a period for testing only) and is likely to be merged into the Git master within this week unless a show stopper is found through the review process. Since the proposed code changes have already been accepted by a core developer from a UI perspective, I expect the new functionality goes in the 2.72 release.

Blender Nation: What are the development plans for Freestyle for Blender2.73 and beyond?

Tamito: Now the Freestyle development puts more focus on performance improvements. Huge memory consumption during Freestyle line rendering is considered a major constraint/bottleneck on cartoon and non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering workflows. Making Freestyle less memory demanding is one of specific requirements for the line renderer from the ongoing Gooseberry open film project. If time permits I will also try to improve rendering speed since Freestyle is a quite time-consuming rendering component, although the performance for speed has been significantly improving since the beginning.

For your information, open discussions on future priority targets in Freestyle development have been ongoing in the bf-blender-npr mailing list. NPR oriented artists and developers interested in new features and improvements of the Freestyle rendering engine are very welcome to the discussion forum.

Blender Nation: Are you working on any other Blender development projects besides Freestyle integration?

Tamito: Most work hours supported by the Blender Foundation (BF) development fund are addressed to Freestyle development, but my BF contract also foresees contributions to Blender NPR rendering capabilities in general. Within this scope I have been trying to help the BEER initiative, which aims to build a new shader system and view port enhancement specifically designed for NPR applications. Work on the bug tracker from a general perspective is also part of my job, although my contributions in this direction have been a kind of limited so far. My knowledge about the Blender code base keeps expanding thanks to the focused development granted by the BF financial support. I hope I will be able to help Blender get improved in different areas other than Freestyle.

Blender Nation: The fans want to know, boxers or briefs?

Tamito: That's classified information! Well, actually I prefer the former :)