Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe
Atom feed for blender

4 posts tagged “blender”

2026

Tool .blend URL Viewer

I'm continuing to have a lot of fun with GPT-6 Astra and Blender (see my TIL).

As a big fan of the Imperial Fabergé Easter eggs, I've always thought it would be fun to make some new ones that celebrate popular culture.

Yesterday I decided to try out the new ChatGPT Images 2.5 by running this prompt:

Generate a photo of a faberge egg that's themed after the TV show Pluribus - research first

It gave me this - honestly not bad for a first attempt!

It's a yellow Fabergé egg, half open. Inside you can clearly see Carol in her black outfit facing off against a choir of creepy white-faced joined humans. There are cacti and it has an Albuquerque New Mexico feel to it. The egg stand has a Pluribus plaque.

Then, just to see what would happen, I pasted that image into Codex running GPT-6 Astra (high) and prompted:

Use your blender local skill to create a blender model of this faverge egg

(Here's the skill file, which I created like this.)

It churned away for 17m51s and built me several .blend files. I already had this vibe-coded Blender viewing experiment lying around, so I added that to my tools collection and now you can use it to see my Pluribus blender model in your browser:

Screenshot of a web-based 3D Blender file viewer showing a rendered gold Fabergé-style jeweled egg. The top of the egg is lifted open, revealing a miniature desert diorama inside with green cacti, brown rocks, and a small black-suited figure standing in the center. The egg's shell is decorated with green gems, pearls, ornate scrollwork, a ring of smiling white egg-shaped faces, and oval medallions painted with a cactus and desert scene. The egg stands on four gold legs over a black marbled base with a gold plaque reading PLURIBUS. The URL bar reads https://github.com/simonw/vibe-coded-blender-projects/blob/main/pluribus-faberge-egg/deliverables/Pluribus_Jeweled_Egg_v1.blend with a View button; top-right buttons read Fit, Wireframe, Clear. A bottom-left info panel reads: Loaded Blender 05.01 · 7.2 MB / 387 meshes · 1099 curves · 1 text · 783,764 vertices · 1,446,560 triangles · 17 materials / Preview: approximate materials and text; unapplied modifiers are omitted. / GitHub URL resolved through jsDelivr

9th Sep 2026, 11:58 pm · 3d, javascript, tools, ai, generative-ai, llms, blender, coding-agents, codex, gpt-6-astra
None
TIL Using Blender with coding agents on macOS

I've been having fun with Blender in ChatGPT Codex on my Mac recently. Getting it to work with coding agents is really easy: install the full Mac application from blender.org and run a prompt like this:

Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle

In this case I followed that up with these two prompts:

OK add a background and a lot of flair

Then:

OK make it a whole lot better

And got this image, generated using Blender's Python API:

A 3D illustration of a white pelican cycling along a seaside boardwalk at sunset. It wears a cream boater hat and a coral scarf, with wings on the handlebars and long orange legs reaching the pedals of a turquoise bicycle. A wicker front basket holds pink and white flowers, and three balloons float behind. Pastel bunting stretches overhead between palm trees. Striped beach huts stand beside a teal sea with a small sailboat, beneath a large peach-colored sun. The scene has a softly lit, toy-like style.

This was covered by my existing Codex subscription, but according to AgentsView it would have cost $4.24 at API prices for gpt-6-astra.

5th Sep 2026, 3:51 pm · ai, generative-ai, llms, blender, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, coding-agents, gpt-6-astra

2024

<model-viewer> Web Component by Google (via) I learned about this Web Component from Claude when looking for options to render a .glb file on a web page. It's very pleasant to use:

<model-viewer style="width: 100%; height: 200px"
  src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/cors-allow/2024/a-pelican-riding-a-bicycle.glb"
  camera-controls="1" auto-rotate="1"
></model-viewer>

Here it is showing a 3D pelican on a bicycle I created while trying out BlenderGPT, a new prompt-driven 3D asset creating tool (my prompt was "a pelican riding a bicycle"). There's a comment from BlenderGPT's creator on Hacker News explaining that it's currently using Microsoft's TRELLIS model.

# 13th December 2024, 6:46 pm / 3d, google, microsoft, ai, web-components, generative-ai, claude, blender, pelican-riding-a-bicycle

2023

bpy—Blender on PyPI (via) TIL you can “pip install” Blender!

bpy “provides Blender as a Python module”—it’s part of the official Blender project, and ships with binary wheels ranging in size from 168MB to 319MB depending on your platform.

It only supports the version of Python used by the current Blender release though—right now that’s Python 3.10.

# 8th September 2023, 3:29 pm / pypi, python, blender

Related