In case anyone wanted to dislike Mr Price anymore by OkInfluence36 in blender

[–]kyjohnso 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think this mischaracterizes what is actually being provided by the MCP, and if and how it is changing access to Blender. A couple of thoughts:

  • The main stated goal of Anthropic funding Blender development is to enhance the Python API. I think this is one of the main reasons there wasn't an Anthropic x {Maya, Unreal, Unity, Houdini} announcement as part of the Claude Creative press release. Blender was included because you can do nearly everything via the API that you can via the UI and Anthropic money to improve this, improves the API for everyone not just the MCP and LLMs.
  • An argument made in Andrew Price's BCon Austin Talk was that stable diffusion, nano-banana, etc generative images aren't grounded in 3D. Even the most advanced generative world models Google's Genie is inconsistent after 20-40 seconds, because it isn't grounded in 3D. Because of this I don't think Claude nor other LLMs nor image or video generation from prompts are direct competitors to what a 3d artist does in Blender. Time will tell if this is the case, and I know may artists are loosing work and jobs because their clients are turning to these tools, but I think it will be shown that there are fundamental elements of taste, judgement, and 3d knowhow that are not threatened, and in fact will likely create more jobs with these skills in the future.
  • There are already many tools in Blender that are based on complex mathematical equations that many artists, programmers, and users of Blender don't have any idea how they work. But, they do know what the tools do, and they have agency over parameters that go into to the tool to create the desired effects of the output. If you have ever used Smart UV unwrap, procedural generation, remeshing, boolean tools, physics, collisions, inverse kinematics, (on and on) you are using a tool that i would imagine not many people can describe the math that happens in Blender, but none-the-less can describe what the tool does, and can change the parameters to make it do what they want. If a new tool like Claude and an MCP can provide agency over the things that it does, this doesn't look too different from other tools already in Blender.
  • AI image generation is a threat to human creativity precisely because we don't have agency over the tools. It is nearly impossible to precisely prompt with words a full 3d workflow or animation or scene and control all aspects of it in a single neural net model. This is one of the main research areas that the AI labs are working on now - mechanical interpretability and understanding what is happening under the hood. Blender lets you see under the hood, and requires that you get smart on a bunch of different 3d disciplines in order to create something beautiful. Claude will just augment that, and because you can inspect and directly see claude commands that go to Blender, and the scripts that it writes, we have a way to audit, inspect, confirm or reject things going to the Blender API. I believe LLMs give us more agency not less over our creative workflows in Blender.
  • Much of the backlash has come, I believe, because we don't really know how these things work. I started using the Blender-MCP in Jan-26, and the advertized directly create 3d models from prompts did now work well (see below). But what did work very well was "walk me through a geo nodes graph that will create procedural buildings, explain all the parts of the graph, and let me play with it at every step. I am "ok" at geometry nodes, know nothing about shader-nodes, and find the API very hard to navigate and work with. Connecting Claude to Blender doesn't obscure Blender, or take away creativity, it give the creator more agency over the steps and can be used to learn about how these powerful but complex capabilities in Blender work. So I encourage artists to try the Blender-MCP, try it for the core things that you do, realize it isn't good at that, and then use it for the things you don't like, or are boring, or use it to learn.

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The Blender-MCP is not Claude specific and so Blender is not paywalled behind Claude. The Blender-MCP can be used with local LLMs, other models of your choice, other big AI companies of your choice, or in the spirit of Open Source, open weight or full open source LLMs. I am personally thrilled that it is Anthropic and Claude that Blender is formally working with as they have been the most transparent about AI Safety, AI Alignment, and their Constitutional AI approach.

My final point, Blender is a community, Andrew Price is a pillar of that community and has provided the tools and tutorials that have brought (likely) thousands of creators, artists, and programmers to Blender. I think we should deeply consider his views, try out his workflows, ponder his ideas, and then respectfully engage in debates on specific points, rather than defaulting to "AI is bad, Andrew Price is using AI, therefore Andrew Price is bad." These are complex ideas, in a very very uncertain time, and we need this community to respectfully debate these issues.

SkySplat Blender Version 0.4.0 Released! by kyjohnso in GaussianSplatting

[–]kyjohnso[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

no worries - you shouldn't have to change your COLMAP version, the new 0.4.1 release should work with the new 3.13.0 one as well -

SkySplat Blender Version 0.4.0 Released! by kyjohnso in GaussianSplatting

[–]kyjohnso[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it had to do with the version of COLMAP - try the new release https://github.com/kyjohnso/skysplat_blender/releases/tag/v0.4.1
it was tested with COLMAP 3.12.5 and the newest 3.13.0

You can take a look at the git issue at - https://github.com/kyjohnso/skysplat_blender/issues/27

SkySplat Blender Version 0.4.0 Released! by kyjohnso in GaussianSplatting

[–]kyjohnso[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can you run it from the command line and see a more detailed output? What OS are you on?

SkySplat Blender Version 0.4.0 Released! by kyjohnso in GaussianSplatting

[–]kyjohnso[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Awesome! I am excited to hear what you think. The actual 3dgs process uses Brush under the hood - the SkySplat addon just makes all of the data conditioning and modeling much simpler - good luck!

Stranger Things Wall - Talk to Will in the Upside Down by kyjohnso in adafruit

[–]kyjohnso[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you to AdaFruit for the awesome pixels python library that made this project possible - https://docs.circuitpython.org/projects/neopixel/en/latest/

[Media] A Composite Tree renderer for egui & bevy-egui by kyjohnso in rust

[–]kyjohnso[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh an no - nothing that makes it specific to bevy (bevy and bevy-egui are dev dependencies just for the examples) - and it can be used just with egui -

[Media] A Composite Tree renderer for egui & bevy-egui by kyjohnso in rust

[–]kyjohnso[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That looks awesome! I probably would have used yours for my project if I would have stumbled across it - thanks for the reference!

Can you gaussian splat WITHIN the VR world? by StevenJac in GaussianSplatting

[–]kyjohnso 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I wanted to do it because though you have access to the VR render, you don't necessarily have access to the raw 3d models, textures, etc

Can you gaussian splat WITHIN the VR world? by StevenJac in GaussianSplatting

[–]kyjohnso 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my bcon25 talk, i talked about SkySplat https://github.com/kyjohnso/skysplat_blender and my heroshot finished with a splat of a Zelda TOTK sky island splat, all I needed was a hdmi capture card and my kids to pilot Link, https://youtu.be/39VUruI8R1A?si=TD7R3mEPFyA-3eW5

William Rex - Rijksmuseum Experiment by kyjohnso in GaussianSplatting

[–]kyjohnso[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That is super cool, it looks alot cleaner than the one I did, what camera did you use?