> Notice: This announcement is causing a lot of feedback. We are actively evaluating it.
Presumably a lot of Blender users work in roles that feel threatened by AI being used for computer graphics work.
Lots of negative replies on Blursky here: https://bsky.app/profile/blender.org/post/3mkkuyq3ijs2q
This feels like the proper way to have AI act as a tool to make artist's jobs easier without taking away their creativity?
Edit: I guess they might want absolutely no AI of any sort in their tools (which seems like a strange line to draw), or is it about the data it's been trained on?
Even if you can see how individual circumstances could be beneficial to your workflow, it's a general direction I think many take issue with quite fairly.
A lot of artists who would love to be able to direct their professional software in natural language have to reconcile that with how this technology came to be and what the aims are of the company now delivering it to them.
It almost totally automated vast swaths of texture generation by creating algorithmic systems that technical artists could use to create textures.
Want a brick texture? Sure, you connect some nodes and set parameters and you have great looking bricks. Want the mortar to be a little more widely spaced? Done. Want some moss on the brick? Want some chipping on the brick? Want some color variation? Done, done, done.
It probably reduced the amount of time to iterate textures by more than 100x.
Now, talented technical artists make OK money because they are good at using these tools. Photoshop jockies are gone.
LLM manipulation of Blender will be interesting but it's very, very challenging to see the path of something like Claude having nearly as big of an impact. It'll be helpful to automate some common tasks, to build internal tooling. But Allegorithmic single handedly changed the way 3D games look, because you could be so much more ambitious.
You didn't really hear about it, though, because it wasn't part of the cultural zeitgeist.
They are conscious of preventing momentum in a bad direction.
If they don't fight it hyper hard, a huge fraction of them will be out of a job instantly.
Which it seems like they can just choose not to use?
Maybe the blowback has more to do with gatekeeping.
I doubt the current state shows the end of their ambitions.
To the surprise of no one.
I understand being unhappy about something but people gotta relax.
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Just like AI image slop and AI book slop prove though, I highly doubt whatever Claude and Blender are cooking up will ever come close to taking a prompt like
> render a scene of a corgi sitting on a chair looking out of a window at 3 cats playing with the corgi's favorite toy.
and turning that into anything useful.
It is a massive SDK though (thousands of functions; feel free to poke around with it; Affinity is free) and so it really shows the ability of LLMs to effectively work across long-horizon tasks massive context windows.
Personally, really interested in Blender though. I'm working on a game as a hobby/side project and I'm very much a newbie / often struggle with learning and using Blender.
There are so many ways these integrations help humans & human creatives; your job and role shouldn't be about how skilled you are with navigating/using a tool, or if you're technically savvy to code scripts to improve your workflow.
Turns out it is possible, one just has to have the script check to see if each level of a given index entry exists or no, then if it does not yet exist, create it before making the next lower level by adding that sub-entry to the one above it.
An LLM is only going to code what it has documented as possible/working and may not be able to do what needs to be done.
I think a big part of it comes from deliberately exposing lowest-level atomic actions; not higher-level wrappers with use-case specific documentation. Instead, we supply very technical/'dry' documentation (inputs, action/effects, return values and types). We leave it to the developer (or the LLM) to write scripts that assemble these pieces together to solve problems.
If you try it with Cowork and Opus 4.7 (recommended), you'll probably see it try a few different technical approaches and iterate; as it tries to accomplish this task. While that's less token efficient, the benefit is flexibility/power, and once you have a solid script, you can just save it and use it again and again without any token costs.
I've worked with Claude in many creative capacities and it's issue is that despite it being able to see if you ask it to draw something (using ascii for example) it will fail, if you ask it to iterate on that drawing it will continue to fail and not get any closer to the target then complain about this.
I've felt that these models struggle with anything that cannot be decomposed into primitives and their architecture is too greedy and favours the obvious, autoregressive generation so it will converge to the modal answer. So unless they have enhanced the models in some creative sense I fail to see how this is anything other than giving Claude a bunch of documentation/MCP servers/APIs/CLI tools (which already existed) and making an announcement out of it.
My point: FREE the models, unchain them and let's see what they are actually capable of, also put some damn demos in the announcement post???
Both seemed pretty promising and fitted with how I’d like AI to assist rather than replace me for creative tasks.
This reminds me I should open source them as I’ve had no time to do more work on them!
[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/11447#issue...
Right now we're seeing moves to record behaviour by operators of all kinds of software. That will eventually be distilled into sets of automations for agents to use. To me that's far more labor targeted and extractive than generative AI.
Get ready for the second one to somehow get worse.
Also, can't generate basic images natively in 2026. So much for AGI.
it smells funny
