Forgive me to use this forum to ask, but can blender render something like this?

yes, but it might not be as antialiased.

Wait for the 2.28 version apparently coming out tomorrow for the toon shader materials (and others)

(I wouldn't know if it is the wrong forum, it kinda seems like a grey area, but it is too late now)

yes
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Yes, Blender can be used to create images like this.

I found an example file that shows how to light an object using a gradient texture and the angle of the surface to do a cool fake lighting, shading thingy.

Take a look at eeshlo's web page and download the 'shading without lights' .blend file.
http://www.stormpages.com/eeshlo/otherBlender.html

This technique should even allow you to have nice outline with changung width as in the drawing.

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I found an example file that shows how to light an object using a gradient texture and the angle of the surface to do a cool fake lighting, shading thingy.

OR...you could use 2.28 or Tuhopuu that use real lights and shadows.

Does anyone know how to achieve an effect like the lines around the inner parts of the object? Blender can do nice edges around the outside of an object, but I can't seem to get any inner lines drawn. It's almost as though Blender's line edges are just a quick hack which detects alpha channel edges...

btw: What was the original image rendered by? Was it the new Rhino3D renderer "Penguin"?

Jonathan Merritt.

jmerritt wrote:

Does anyone know how to achieve an effect like the lines around the inner parts of the object?

Eeshlo's example (mentioned above) does this partially. From what I understand, this is a Non-Trivial problem - deciding what is an edge, what is a highlight, etc.
My favourite resource for this is the Stylized Depiction page, a huge list of links to various NPR resources (including a dedicated toon shading section). Lots of academic papers as PDFs, if you're up for them.
Also, googling for "npr rendering" gets you a whole mess of fascinating results, including this interesting code snippet (in java).

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btw: What was the original image rendered by? Was it the new Rhino3D renderer "Penguin"?

It appears to be an image from a bicycle site, so it's possibly a vector tracing of a photograph or similar. Although there are some similar pictures on the NPR page above, so who knows?
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From what I understand, this is a Non-Trivial problem - deciding what is an edge, what is a highlight, etc.

This is also my understanding. I think you need a variety of different techniques which depend heavily upon the scene you're rendering and the exact look you want.

The Advanced RenderMan textbook:

Apodaca, A.A. and Gritz, L. (2000) Advanced RenderMan: Creating CGI for Motion Pictures. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. ISBN: 1-55860-618-1.

has a chapter on npr techniques which also suggests some methods for edge classification. These methods could be implemented in Blender (if they're not already... I can't claim to know very much about the toon shaders: I'm still experimenting! )

I'm currently working on an image using the toon shaders that *might* make it into a textbook on equine podiatry (I'll be sure to post the book reference if it does!). Currently, I'm adding any extra edges using Sodipodi (awesome program!!!) and/or The Gimp. It'd be great to have that done automagically though...

Jonathan Merritt.