I was pleased to find a new YouTube video from the 3D Comic Creator, “DAZ Studio To Blender To Freestyle For Inking Your Comic”. He shares an in-depth 90-minute workflow for taking a DAZ Studio character into Blender and wrangling Freestyle lineart onto it. It’s clearly explained and he’s a good presenter.
I’m not sure I’d want to go through all that pain and intense fiddly-ness, though. Just to get what Poser 11’s Comic Book mode / Sketch Designer can output ‘at the drop of a hat’ in real-time. But it’s interesting to see how the most advanced DAZ users are trying to make artwork for comics. And as Freestyle is currently something of a “moving target”, along with the rest of Blender, there’s always the possibility that Freestyle and other NPR aspects of Blender will start to become easier and more automatic to use, in future. But for now the problem with Freestyle is that it’s old, and thus can only use one CPU thread. It’s not multi-threaded. Nor can it work with alpha-channels.
It’s very early days, but a better option might be a project called BEER/Malt that intends to try making NPR easier to get from Blender. Another hopes to add an easy SketchUp-like ‘sketched outlines’ capability to the default install of Blender (something you can only do with a paid plugin at present). Although both have very primitive demos at present.