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Discussion (158 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
So they want claude to be able to talk to blender
I've used Claude to write some blender scripts and it's an excellent use case. I look forward to even better claude/blender interaction based on this annonuncement.
That being said, it's about the same for the code it produces for non purely creative things, but for artistic work, I doubt an LLM in between gives any gain. After all, we do have an interface. A human interface.
Not sure if this one was the one I saw, but Google gave me this one. You could use Claude Code to build things with Blender.
https://blender-mcp.com/
https://youtu.be/LZMWsZbZU5w
"Some software" is approaching levels of complexity where, perhaps, it gets to a point where a human is barely able to even use it.
At the same time (brave new world) LLM assisted software opens up the possibility of levels of complexity we would not have considered before.
I'm reminded of Sam Altman's performative helplessness on Jimmy Kimmel, when he described being unable believe a baby without ChatGPT. That's something I believe humanity has been capable of doing for a good portion of its existence, and not something we should give up to the hands of a yet-unproven, yet-unprofitable technology.
Further, I'm suggesting "designed by people to be understood and used by people" might be a hurdle for some future software we might envision.
(Altman's performance is orthogonal as I'm suggesting a new level of software that has not yet been written/conceived.)
While it’s just a “you” problem. Some folks have better skills, knowledge and comfort with difficult subjects. And that’s fine.
Art should demand more of the creator than the person experiencing it.
The alternative is 9 billion who cares slop things.
I know what I want, no idea how to tool my way there.
I spend two months going through YT tutorials, mucking about in Blender in order to figure out how to put together the model I have in my head [1].
(A year later, a new project idea—and it's back to YouTube because the learning is not only a steep curve but also sometimes so esoteric that it's fleeting.)
[1] https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/Space-Tug_3DModel
As an amateur this is really exciting - but not sure about folks that are real pros at this stuff.
Would be rad to incorporate some statistical procedurally generated designs based on my own aparatus.
What I do not want to see is this realm of LLMs hijacking decades of hard work and consideration for integration channels to more tailor towards their LLMs, not for the diligent engineer.
If they want to put their tentacles as far as they want while making products more difficult to work with innovation of a different color, they are making enemies out of, at least me.
AI _can_ work with 3D models already, but it's really bad at it. CAD requires an extra level of control and I think this is where I could see AI companies wanting to get a foot in the door.
e.g "Let's build an adapter between 2in BSP Male and 3/4in NPT Female threads with a third Hose Barb outlet with the following properties..."
MuBlE: MuJoCo and Blender simulation Environment and Benchmark for Task Planning in Robot Manipulation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02834
This just means more support for a major OSS project.
I doubt Anthropic has much use for such a tool internally. They're sponsoring it because they want to inject their slop into it and replace the people who do use it.
> Blender Foundation’s mission remains to empower artists with free/open source technology and tools. Yet, we also maintain APIs for individuals and corporations to extend Blender, also beyond what’s aligned with Blender’s mission. We consider this part of the Software Freedom that’s embodied with Blender’s GNU GPL license.
Oh, noes, the horrors of democratising access to an expert tool. What will onshape do now, that the free one is accessible to oom more regular people that could use a 3d shape but don't have the time to learn a very complicated yet powerful tool?
I guess people have said the same about game engines / coding tools that help artists turn their vision into working, compiling games, right? Riiight?
edit: I seem to be rate limited and unable to reply? I'll paste it here:
I'm sorry but I don't agree. People care about art when it is extraordinary, in the same way people watch professional sport because it is extraordinary, or they watch cooking shows because it's extraordinary. What you call "democratisation" I would call the trivialisation of something which used to take effort into something which does not. People don't watch random people who have never played soccer before at the World Cup, they don't watch someone who can barely cook Kraft dinner cook on MasterChef, and they don't go to museums to look at someone's first sketch. There is no reason to assume that the trivialisation of art wouldn't simply devalue the medium to the point of irrelevance. However since people seek what is extraordinary, you will always have gates which are kept, and for good reason.
edit 2, responding to hbosch:
You don't have to be an extraordinary soccer player to enjoy playing soccer, but that doesn't mean we should develop a pill that makes everyone a great soccer player with no skill development or effort required. We don't watch professional sports just to see a ball move fast, we watch to see what a human is capable of through discipline and hard work. If everyone could take a pill to become an elite athlete, the sport wouldn't be democratized, it would be deleted.
When you remove the effort barrier you don't make art easier, you collapse the meaning of striving for excellence. If the 'expert' and the 'novice' produce the same result with the same button press, we haven't empowered the novice, we’ve just made the expertise irrelevant.
Tools like Blender are force multipliers for human intent, generative AI is a replacement for it. If you use Blender to make a "stupid little game," you’ve gained a skill. If you use AI to generate the assets for that game, you haven't gained a skill, you’ve simply acted as a manager for an automated system. The value of that game to the creator isn't just the code, it’s the fact that they built it. I find it really hard to believe that people find value besides the initial novelty in having a computer generate stupid little games - for what purpose? If nobody is going to play it, and you haven't built it, precisely where does the value in it come from? It's like a simulacrum of human creation.
What I actually see is people who are unwilling to put in the effort but seek the rewards anyways. They want the accolades from creation but without the hard work. I dont see the value in enabling this.
To me it just comes across like the stereotype of a lonely house wife peaking through the blinds judging the neighbors.
This forum is just as absurd as Reddit but in a subtle way; politically correct language without the zany memes but nonetheless absurd sense of self righteousness and importance and the validity of endless unsubstantiated assertions and qualifications.
As if not posting about Harambe affords legitimacy while posting what boils down to intrusive thoughts about people and motives y'all are removed from.
The nostalgia fueled appeals to preserve your grasp of reality specifically are just a modern conservatism. Time moves on and has as little obligation to stand still for HN doomers as it does adherents of traditional religions, contemporary American capitalism .
The horse and buggy and rotary phone and other engineers screwed out of careers by off shoring playing a tiny violin for script kiddies who grew up to become expert Python and DevOps engineers.
Get over yourself. Your efforts are a drop in the ocean of human effort. Ffs this comes off as some fine whine.
The upside is meaningless compared to what's at risk when for-profit grows influence.
And I'm pretty sure I've seen most of the other big names in tech on the sponsors page for many years now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code
[2] https://code.blender.org/2011/04/google-summer-of-code-2011-...
Relatedly, IMO "trust" as a word / concept is deserving of being reevaluated nowadays.
E.g. I don't know that you, NitpickLawyer, are a real person. And when I go through the mental exercise of inventing the details, proofs, and evidence I'd need in order to satisfy my doubt, I never succeed until I reach the physical-contact-with-NitpickLawyer condition.
So I think we need to evaluate what is necessary for oneself to operate in society, separate from these untrustable things .. such as media / news reports, and all the other things I just don't want to worry about, right now. :-(
The only losers here are old or bitter people who have tied up their worldview into their own time and cannot see or comprehend that the world has moved on with a different bound for the experiences and expectations.
If you like listening to AI generated content, then that’s fine! I’m glad you found something you enjoy.
For me, I consume art because I want to understand other people. For example, when I go to an art museum I want to emotionally connect with the artist: to feel what they were feeling, or understand an idea they’re conveying. I have little desire to emotionally connect with stochastic token sampling. It seems a vapid way to spend time
I suspect your connection to real artists won't be impacted. This, like the music example, just highlights our assumptions.
I'm not defending this AI garbage fwiw, i just don't think it's as interesting as most people make it out to be. I adore music, and i connect with songs i connect with. I don't typically think about the possible ghost writers, teams of writers, ghost players, etc. The music either speaks to me or it doesn't.
Though i'm not trying to connect to the musician as a person. However, as i was illustrating - if i really wanted to connect to musicians at face value, that ship sailed many, many years ago. Far before AI.
There are ways to mitigate this, but that balance will always be there - it was before AI, and it will be after. It's an evolution. Not an enjoyable one perhaps, but it is nonetheless.
- https://donnybenet.bandcamp.com/album/il-basso
Totally not written by Google.
Storytelling didn’t go away when the theatre was invented. Theatre didn’t go away when cinema arrived. Cinema wasn’t replaced when radio arrived, ad that wasn’t completely replace by TV, etc. It is a mix of things these days and it will probably remain that way.
If not, doesn't your argument entirely miss the point?
This is a really interesting example. Why do you foresee artistic direction going away as a result of AI? More importantly: why didn't we lose that with the transitions through the years of special effects - i.e., from practical to 3D-rendered?
Having more native integration into Blender, which I'm already much more familiar with, will be fantastic.
The biggest challenge at this point is figuring out how to make the dice print consistently. With each die face only having a few points of contact, they keep unsticking. What I'm trying now is cutting the dice in half, printing the halves, and then sticking them together with dowels.
[0] https://www.printables.com/model/821177-octobabble-a-word-ba...
[1] https://github.com/PeterFajner/braille_octobabble/
This is unsurprising as a general development other than Anthropic doesn’t have a 3D model generation framework.
I don’t think this is to create MCP servers necessarily but rather to improve the blender pipeline further.
Recently I've been using Claude Code with `build123d`[0] and it's pretty good, but my wife uses Blender so it would be cool to come up with something at least halfway decent and then have her clean it up.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2026-04-24/Modeling_Bet...
I agree that it's not a good look for Blender, but I don't think that something actually bad will come from this. (Other than maybe a negative impact to Blender's reputation.)
We'll see how it shakes out. As a non-proficient Blender user, I'm kinda keen on this since I have had a lot of ideas that I haven't been able to realize in Blender.
Money is good. But not antagonizing your community (as an open source project) is better.
Some of them, like the illustrious MrDoob (behind Threejs), love AI and are all-in on it.
The VFX folks at Corridor Crew [1] have been leaning into AI for years now and showing a healthy attitude and path forward to using AI in workflows.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@CorridorCrew
I'd prefer Blender get some additional funding out of this AI bubble at least.
Exactly right. Everyone online is all to happy to proclaim what hill other people should die on, but is rarely willing to go up there themselves.
I feel this a thinly veiled attempt at again, stealing IP.
There already are LLM plugins for Blenders and prompt integration for model generation, rigging and co.
If the idea is to support Blender for use with “Digital Twins” or “World Models” then the first step is to start with accurate geometry. Anything less is slop.
[1]: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZMWsZbZU5w
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gen8rG40ntA
The press release calls out the Blender Python API, specifically, which makes sense for agentic use.
Pretty much spells it out. They have an interest in extending/supporting the ability for Claude/CC to use and interact with Blender. There may be gaps in endpoints that Anthropic needs to enable certain patterns of automated usage.
Chances are they were expecting the agent to spoon-feed hundreds of influencers.
“We love art :P”
Blender already has ton of other Corporate Patron level sponsors, such as Netflix, Meta, Intel, BMW, Adobe and others.
[1]: https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/
I understand that creating an LLM itself is transformative, but an LLM trained on copyrighted works remains capable of generating derivative works, which eventually will result in successful copyright lawsuits against LLM users who redistribute those derivative works.
In advance of that day, the great race is to build a licensed corpus as aggressively as possible (see Github's latest decision to opt in Copilot usage). Even if Blender doesn't send your data on every save, various options can be developed, such as publishing to a Blender-controlled public channel.
I wonder, if Ton was involved in that decision, or if it's only Francesco. Could turn out to be a very unlucky start into the leadership role.
And the worries about "blender just being sold to xyz..." have been around forever. Always wrong. People with AMD cards were screaming when Nvidia became sponsor, and other way round.
It is more about the signal sent, in this case.
For everyone who is interested, here is the mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@Blender/116482997785333001 (it is just like to be expected though)
AI is a nebulous term. AI denoisers are not the same thing as an LLM or image gen model, the ire is directed at LLMs and not AI denoisers because they are completely different things.
If Blender doesn't grow AI capabilities, its utility in the future will be severely degraded.
If you haven't seen 3D mesh, texturing, PBR, and retopo tools, they're getting extremely good.
Also was wondering how'd it would do things like sculpting? That sounds expensive like either you send millions of polygons for the model to explore? And that ruins the context window order doesn't even fit, or your sending tons of screenshots?
And Blender tries to get funding from many different donors so that no single one can have any sway over them. Anthropic, as disgusting as they are, are just one more donor. Epic, Nvidia, Google, CoreWeave are also patrons. I don't worry about that donation.
You know, for now...
Ah well, the online artist community is unusually principled on matters like this, especially compared to here. If they start doing shady stuff it will get forked and probably spell the end of the Blender foundation, which would still be really bad of course.
Sigh. Not a happy Tuesday.