How to have freestyle render change to outline only at a distance I've been playing with making coloring pages from some low-poly models of mine. To give my coloring pages variety without too much work on my part, I created a scene, populated it with all the models, and created cameras looking at it from different angles, with a different focus on each one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7OWs0-pGmA

However, with this method, sometimes objects in the background get very line-dense, and I'd like if Blender could pick those object out and remove the extra lines, perhaps even switching to just outlines in those cases. Is there any way to accomplish this?
Solution: Use a freestyle line modifier

For your scene I'd recommend using the Distance from Camera modifier on Alpha of the freestyle lines found in the Linestyle panel. The hack is to choose the same value for Range Min and Range Max. This will draw a sharp distinction between the 'close' and the 'far' objects in view.
With two line sets (one for the 'close' objects and the other for the 'far') you can choose for the 'far' line set to only render the outlines.

Here's a simple example

That's the freestyle setup


The scene without any modifiers



And with the modifiers