I've added six photos to my Flickr stream showing off some 3D mesh drawings. Basically, you can load or make a mesh in Blender, then use the newly integrated Freestyle renderer to make the line segments, which a script exports as an SVG file.

The script:
http://www.geocities.jp/blenderyard/freestyle/svgwriter_b26/README.html

To see the photos, start here:
http://flic.kr/p/eCtQp9

I made the drawings months ago, but have been waiting for Freestyle to be added to the "main trunk" of Blender before sharing, thinking it would be easier to make a tutorial. Well, it's in Blender 2.67 now, and I've read the export script is being considered for trunk as well (which would make things even easier), but I'm just too swamped at the moment to make a huge how-to post. Hopefully the few Blenderheads reading this will be able to put the pieces together.

Yes it totally is ace - I love that there's a workflow for this. It's a physical machine with a human's pen, controlled by a computer, drawing a human-readable rendering of a digital model of a physical thing. I love it. Thanks Kong for letting us know - great results too!

@polargrapher - It might not have been the look you were after, but I like that solid wireframe drawing of yours very much. To make the drawing more like mine is actually easier than what you did: next time don't use the solid wireframe addon. That's about it. Freestyle will take care of the rest.

edit: Getting anything useful out of Blender during your first weekend of fiddling with it automatically puts you in the "extremely gifted" category. That the drawing turned out so well is only confirmation.

Guys,
can you pin-point me to what render settings I need to enable/disable in blender? I can render a solid object into an svg just fine, but it refuses to output meshed objects. The post render window shows a meshed object, but there's no output. Hmm. Should it be set to 'wire' under the materials tab?

Hey thanks,

Have everything setup as described, script loaded in text editor and all. Hmm, your trick didn't do much, still getting a image to vector traced type output (contours without the mesh). I'll tinker a bit around, sure is a lot of settings in blender. Thanks for the tip.

EDIT: Ah, got it! Figured I actually had to click drag mark the object/polygons before CTRL-E and mark freestyle edge.

Too make sure all your freestyle lines are 'perfectly tight' when you render your object - change back to parameter editor mode from python scripting under render layers option,
then deselect all options (contour, silhouette etc) but leave the edge mark on - in the freestyle line set dropdown box.
(this will elimnate any loose lines) then change back to python scripting mode for rendering.
Cheers kongorilla for original post the polargrapher.

The same results can be achieved in Maya.

Have you gone over the Freestyle section in the Blender manual?
https://www.blender.org/manual/render/freestyle/index.html

Setting the crease angle to 180 should draw all edges if you have "Crease" selected as an edge type. If you'd like to choose (by hand) some edges to be drawn, select them, hit Ctrl-e, click "Mark Freestyle Edge" and make sure to add "Edge Mark" to your edge types.