When you start displaying your images in online galleries and forums you will eventually be asked to provide wireframes of your work. Wireframes are excellent for studying a model's topology and polygon flow and can really say a great deal about how the mesh is constructed. They are also very useful when giving critique since you can actually see how one polygon is connected to the next.

Wireframes are usually just simple screen grabs or actual renders with Render as Editor checked, but if you want better looking wires to display there are other better ways than these. In this short tutorial I will show how you can spice up those wireframes to look a bit more professional. I will be using Photoshop but any 2D software with layers and various blending modes will work.

Create a simple scene with a standard Cube object (Objects > Primitive > Cube) and a Background object (Objects > Scene > Background). By adding a Background we make sure that our scene will not render completely black but rather a smooth gray like in the image below.

Make the Cube editable to simulate a more complex mesh and drop it in a HyperNURBS to give it a rounder appearance:

This is the render you want to display but you also want to show the actual mesh. A common solution is to simple activate the Cel Render option with Edges checked in the Render Settings, which will give you this:

Not exactly what we want. We have a wireframe but a wireframe of the smoothed mesh, not the actual cage. It's very hard to give constructive criticism on a wire like this. Deactivating the HyperNURBS is better and also satisfactory for most situations:

Now we have a wireframe that shows the actual non-smoothed mesh and people can study how the mesh is constructed. But we will take this a couple of steps further by invoking the mighty Photoshop.

You will first have to render two versions of your image, one shaded with HyperNURBS activated and one Cel Render (Edges checked) with HyperNURBS deactivated:

Load both images in Photoshop and create a new document roughly the same size as your renders. Now drag the two renders onto the canvas of the new document by using the Move Tool while pressing down the Shift-key. Pressing down Shift will ensure that the layers are perfectly centered on the new canvas. You should end up with three layers in the new document so rename the two new ones to Cel render and Shaded render:

Now make sure your Cel render layer is the first in the layer hierarchy and set its mode to Multiply:

The Multiply mode will basically make the white pixels transparent while keeping the black pixels opaque, and thus the shaded image underneath will be visible:

And there we have a much better wireframe for display as it shows both the shaded model and the polygon cage. A nice trick is to adjust the hue and saturation of the Cel render layer to give the wire a different colour:

That's it. Using this technique as a starting point you can produce high class wireframes in no time.