External renderers for blender

Here is a list of free renderers which are compatible with Blender.

http://www.toxicengine.org/ - "toxic is a physically correct global illumination renderer" its for photrealistic rendering. but still, handy to know about.

http://www.aqsis.org/xoops/modules/news/ - A renderman compliant renderer.
I've downloaded this, I will play with NPR shaders with it sometime.

http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/ - another photrealistic renderer, this time in Java.

http://www.pointzero.nl/renderers/ - a list of renderers, I think it has ones for Blender on it as well.

http://shell.studenti.unina.it/~ospite/vrm/section/en/about.html - more of a plugin for Blender, I think. Its a vector graphic renderer.

Yafray (www.yafray.org) is a realistic rendering engine for Blender as well.

a free addon for Blender is: http://www3.sympatico.ca/emilio.aguirre/s2flender.html flender, a blender to flash (swf) converter. Latest version is 2.6, I used an older version, and it was pretty sweet.

blend 2 sketch, a pretty awesome looking converter which exports to Sketch (vector images) http://www.fauskes.net/code/blend2sketch/
Sketch manual:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~eugene.ressler/manual.html

Comics style rendering engine thing. This generates images with really hard blacks, which look like they come out of an old school comic book (like 2000 AD or something). Its quite nice looking, but a hard style to get right.
http://inkulator.sourceforge.net/index.php

Blender specific edge/npr rendering

Blender specific things, there are no doubt a couple I've missed, and a few I've blogged about before (pantograph, freestyle)

a free addon for Blender is: http://www3.sympatico.ca/emilio.aguirre/s2flender.html flender, a blender to flash (swf) converter. Latest version is 2.6, I used an older version, and it was pretty sweet.

blend 2 sketch, a pretty awseome looking converter which exports to Sketch http://www.fauskes.net/code/blend2sketch/
Sketch manual:
http://www.frontiernet.net/~eugene.ressler/manual.html

Comics style rendering engine thing. This generates images with really hard blacks, which look like they come out of an oldschool comic book. Its quite nice looking, but a hard style to get right.
http://inkulator.sourceforge.net/index.php

there was an older one, called SLiM, waaaay back. but i cant find it.

Edit:
I found it! here: http://www.geocities.com/pollythesheep/SLiM.zip wooo!

SliM thread
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=14088

Renderman things

Renderman uses shaders to do stuff, and there are quite a few shaders out there if you look. There are also some free renderman compliant renderers out there too. renderman isn't a renderer, as such, its a shader description language.

http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/downloads_shaders/shaders_list/

http://txspace.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/1125

the site is orange! they might be GLSL shaders.
http://www.3dshaders.com/home/

a google book, more to do with open GL shaders, but has some interesting NPR shaders
http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=eTU1SpAdH98C&pg=PA81&lpg=PA81&dq=non+photorealistic+shader&source=web&ots=2A0ifAmIsT&sig=ctjN9sWhh7F1ld6Hn6-RIb94eFo&hl=en#PPR12,M1

maya toon shader.
http://www.vrvis.at/vr/cgr4/cartoonshader/index.html

"Advanced Renderman: Creating CGI for Motion Pictures" has npr in it

http://www.ideepix.nl/work/recent.php?what=NonPhoto has a mention of techniques from this book, I wonder if my local university has it, or how much it is on Amazon....


EDIT:

www.renderman.org has shaders on it, I found this ages ago.]

BtoR is a blender to Rib (renderman) exporter.
http://www.stormwind-studios.com/metadot/index.pl?id=2015

Renderman compliant renderers (non-free, i'llpost some free ones later)
http://www.3delight.com/en/ - 3delight
http://www.sitexgraphics.com/html/air.html - Air
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/renderman.html - Renderman/PRman/somethinglikethat...

Newsgroup Renderman FAQ
http://objectmix.com/graphics/147231-renderman-faq-monthly-posting.html

Non-free NPR renderers

I'm upgrading to kubuntu hoary from a gusty backup due to trying to get my phone to pair with my computer (don't ask, I have no idea what happened), which will take a while. I want to do an update once a week, at least, so this week I'm doing a brief roundup of non-free NPR renderers. These are just ones I've found on my travels around the internet, its by no means an exhaustive list. I don't have any interest in them really, other than trying to mimic the techniques.

First off, we have Illustrate! its for 3d studio. find it here It looks pretty. Apparently Aardman's Chicken-Run used it for previz, and Production IG use it for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone complex. Nice!

Jot is't exactly non-free, but you have to email them to get it. The web link is broken though, otherwise I'd have a bit of a play and some screenshots.

The reyes plugins have been around for a while, and they make a toon one, as well as a bunch of other plugins for 3ds max, for clothing etc.... http://www.reyes-infografica.com/

http://www.penguin3d.com/

not sure it does NPR, but probably not.
http://www.yafray.org/

Piranesi is a really nice watercolour renderer, it looks like stuff an architect would do.
http://www.informatix.co.uk/piranesi/gallery.shtml

This is a huge page of NPR links. Its pretty old though, and some of the links are dead :( Quite a bit of it seems to be algorhythms and such. http://www.red3d.com/cwr/npr/

oooh, http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=1274871&idx=SERIES963&type=proceeding&coll=Portal&dl=ACM&part=series&WantType=Proceedings&title=NPAR&CFID=27847381&CFTOKEN=89643736
"Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Non-photorealistic animation and rendering", which includes such things as Team Fortress!

glsl shaders are in gameblender, not sure how to get them in a blender animation though.
http://www.bonzaisoftware.com/npr.html

according to this article, Poser has some NPR stuff in it. hurrah!
http://images.google.co.nz/imgres?imgurl=http://www.bellaonline.us/~digitalart/efrontier/Poser7/SketchOfMan.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art52951.asp&h=296&w=439&sz=19&hl=en&start=581&sig2=MOJukFwDLYB8XpJWFzGx-Q&um=1&tbnid=O1nkqWkiudcOBM:&tbnh=86&tbnw=127&ei=9sAqSKyLPKCKpwSGwLSzBA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dnon%2Bphotorealistic%2Brender%26start%3D576%26ndsp%3D18%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dcom.ubuntu:en-US:official%26sa%3DN

finaltoon looks freakin sweet! check out the gallery, this is a page with some examples of line types.
http://cebas.com/products/feature.php?FID=306&PID=37&UD=10-7888-31-788

http://www.gdi.com.cn/product_detail.asp?BigClassName=SketchUp6.0(G)%D4%F6%D6%B5%B0%E6

http://algorithmicarts.com/gallery/ Made for maya, examples of the EVA renderer and the Expressive Effects plugins for Maya.

External Renderers

Not too much more right now, I'm off to buy shoes!

Anyway, I 've previously mentioned Freestyle as an NPR renderer (its specifically designed for it). It doesn't like to run under wine,and I'm not willing to take the time right now to piss about compiling it for linux, especially since I can't get it to work :(

Anyway, the other one I've found which is similar is called Pantograph. Its a couple of python scripts which convert renders to SVG (or something, anyway the output is SVG). So this is interesting, in theory you could change the line styles, add a bit of randomness to the lines, whatever. I've not had a play with SVG yet, so I don't know for sure.
But it sounds cool! Link is here:
I should have a bit of a play with it later and see what else I can get from it.

Another thing with potential is Renderman compliant renderers. There are quite a few free ones out there (i'll post a list later). Renderman was invented by Pixarm, and is a shader description language. I'm not sure if its a standard, but its quite popular, and worth looking into as well.

External renderer: Freestyle

There is also freestyle, a renderer (open source, too) which is compatible with Blender and makes some pretty awesome looking images. I can't compile it at the moment, but I'm updating to Hardy, so who knows, maybe I'll be able to do it. Its annoying there are no binaries out for it under Linux that I could find. :(
Other option is to install virtualbox and w2k and run it under that, but that seems a bit excessive.