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.
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.
"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.
Art should demand more of the creator than the person experiencing it.
The alternative is 9 billion who cares slop things.
MuBlE: MuJoCo and Blender simulation Environment and Benchmark for Task Planning in Robot Manipulation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02834
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..."
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. :-(
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
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.
- https://donnybenet.bandcamp.com/album/il-basso
Totally not written by Google.
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?
This just means more support for a major OSS project.
Anthropic hasn't even shipped an image or video model. What is "stealing art", the fact that AI models are trained on data? What constitutes stealing in that?
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?
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-...
I'd prefer Blender get some additional funding out of this AI bubble at least.
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.
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.
> This support will be dedicated towards Blender core development, to maintain and continuously improve foundational features like the Blender Python API, which enables developers and artists alike to extend and improve the software for custom workflows.
Chances are they were expecting the agent to spoon-feed hundreds of influencers.
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.
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.
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.
Blender already has ton of other Corporate Patron level sponsors, such as Netflix, Meta, Intel, BMW, Adobe and others.
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)
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...
Texturing still is subpar. But I've found that using Hunyuan for modeling+retopo+unwrap -> clean up in blender -> texture in substance painter is actually a pretty nice workflow for some stuff.
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.
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 love art :P”
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/spreadshee...
1. That looks great and I hope they can make blender even better, or pay people to do that. Raise your rates for corps Blender!
2. What does this have to do with any strategic position for Claude. Their goals are
“Enterprises pay us a fortune to either
1. Sift through unbelievable volumes of data to pick out fairly easy to find nuggets
2. Tell everyone their jobs are at risk to keep them in line”
There is no other play. AGI is science fiction.
So why are they launching this? Because they don’t have a strategic core running through - it’s always been “wow what else can this do”. That’s a research project at the price of billion dollar data centres.
Unless we do achieve AGI (which we won’t) the price tag is way beyond the returns we are seeing.
I feel this a thinly veiled attempt at again, stealing IP.
The AI "bubble" is hard to pop, at least for this big companies which will just receive bailout after bailout from the Government if shit hits the fan.
I don't see how Anthropic sponsoring Blender is an "attempt at again stealing IP"
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...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhN7P7ENu4g
That was ancient times in LLM terms. I've seen demos that create whole scenes in a single prompt.
There are lots of non-coding use cases for LLMs that don't burn through compute but are still useful. Anthropic is starting to catch on, and it makes sense to focus there with the compute crunch.
It's tedious work, not the most fun thing to do especially for units like random enemy #20.
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?
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.
