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Description
So I finally got around to figuring out Blender's edge line. And, yes, it's powerful. It's also a pain in the ass to use, and slow, and it doesn't show up on rendered preview. How are you ever supposed to get good settings from something you have to render every time to tweak the values?

So I tried this out. This is basically how MMD makes edge line. And actually, Blender probably does something similar as part of it's Freestyle suite.

Copy a mesh. Give it a new mat. Reverse the normals (ctrl-shift-n in edit.) Leave the modifiers on, and add a new one like in the pic. I'm adding the displacement modifier just to create thickness in the mesh-- to bring it slightly outside of the body along its normals. Notice I'm not even giving it a texture to work from, I just want it all working evenly. You could just scale it out by normals, but a displacement mod like this is fast, and it's nice to leave it in a state where it can be tuned, driven, or reversed.

The material is simple too. If we're backfacing, we draw nothing-- full white transparency shader. So you can see through the mesh, since you reversed the normals. If we're front facing, I'm giving it a flat black diffuse for a black outline. (You can mix this with a transparency shader or use a different color if you want.) I suppose it wouldn't be a bad idea to do a minimum(is camera ray, backfacing) to prevent it from screwing with other stuff. But in the Cycles settings, we've disabled visibility to everything except Camera rays, so I don't think it matters.

You can tune the strength of the displacement modifier, or use a driver to link its strength to camera distance/fov to create a somewhat relative edge line. Of course, that's still going to be per-object, not per-pixel, not as beautifully tuned as Blender Freestyle.

Not quite as good, but it previews and it's faster.

Description
So I finally got around to figuring out Blender's edge line. And, yes, it's powerful. It's also a pain in the ass to use, and slow, and it doesn't show up on rendered preview. How are you ever supposed to get good settings from something you have to render every time to tweak the values?

So I tried this out. This is basically how MMD makes edge line. And actually, Blender probably does something similar as part of it's Freestyle suite.

Copy a mesh. Give it a new mat. Reverse the normals (ctrl-shift-n in edit.) Leave the modifiers on, and add a new one like in the pic. I'm adding the displacement modifier just to create thickness in the mesh-- to bring it slightly outside of the body along its normals. Notice I'm not even giving it a texture to work from, I just want it all working evenly. You could just scale it out by normals, but a displacement mod like this is fast, and it's nice to leave it in a state where it can be tuned, driven, or reversed.

The material is simple too. If we're backfacing, we draw nothing-- full white transparency shader. So you can see through the mesh, since you reversed the normals. If we're front facing, I'm giving it a flat black diffuse for a black outline. (You can mix this with a transparency shader or use a different color if you want.) I suppose it wouldn't be a bad idea to do a minimum(is camera ray, backfacing) to prevent it from screwing with other stuff. But in the Cycles settings, we've disabled visibility to everything except Camera rays, so I don't think it matters.

You can tune the strength of the displacement modifier, or use a driver to link its strength to camera distance/fov to create a somewhat relative edge line. Of course, that's still going to be per-object, not per-pixel, not as beautifully tuned as Blender Freestyle.

Not quite as good, but it previews and it's faster.