The Blender AI Situation over the past month

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Wanted to talk a bit about some AI related news to Blender recently, in which there are 4 main things that happened.

  1. Blender content creator Andrew “Blender Guru” Price is outed as an AI grifter
  2. Anthropic becomes a Corporate Patron of the Blender Foundation
  3. Anthropic launches Claude integration with Blender
  4. Blender revokes Anthropic’s Corporate Patron status

First, something lighthearted. Blender Guru’s been a bit of a controversial figure for a while in the Blender community, but his recent promotion of AI generated content has given people more reason to dislike him. The 3D artist twitter community spent about a week clowning on him, and retroactively criticizing some of his earlier work, like this one slide from a 2018 talk he did at Blender Con where he estimates the price of a traffic cone asset in production as costing $3,600, among other incredulous prices.

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Image Source: https://x.com/AndrewNameless/status/2045805676153205135?s=20

A lot of people responded by speedrunning traffic cone models, and eventually Blender Guru responded by setting his twitter profile picture to an image of him wearing a traffic cone.

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The end result of all of this is that his reptuation has seemingly gotten much worse than it already was, and he has seemingly lost a lot of his good will and credibility as a 3D professional.

Then about three days ago, Blender announced Anthropic would be joining their development fund as a Corporate Patron, in which they’d be joining the likes of Wacom, Netflix Animation, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Meta, Adobe, and a bunch of other corporate partners (full list here). I honestly don’t know what the extent of a Corporate Patron is, whether they have power in what gets publicly updated to the software or pushed officially. Regardless, this received a lot of public pushback.

At the same time, Anthropic announced the ability to use Claude as a tool inside of Blender to perform a variety of tasks. In the video they showcase Claude applying textures to some rocks in a scene, and deleting and modifying objects. A lot of these batch operations have been possible through script automation in the past, so this isn’t anything new. It’s important to mention that Claude isn’t generating any meshes or textures with AI here. It’s just performing simple operations.

Whether or not Claude is actually useful is still up in the air. I’m not going to experiment with it personally, because the usecase honestly isnt that common in my work, and I cant see this saving much time for me that couldn’t be saved in easier and faster ways. A professional 3D artist George Crudo posted a thread on twitter where he tested the tools, and shows off its lack of competence. Crudo has a history of being critical against AI in 3D workflows, and has analyzed other AI tools similarly in the past, showing how ineffective they are as tools for artists.

Back to Blender. Today, they announced that they’d be revoking Anthropic’s Corporate Patron status and will instead accept Anthropic’s funds as a donation rather than as a Corporate Patron. It sounds like the Blender Foundation will now be more public on their decisions to interact with any AI company, but it does not seem to be ruled out entirely. Despite this incident, their Corporate Patrons page still lists Meshy.ai, an AI 3D Model Generation platform. So whether or not Blender will work with AI in the future is still up in the air.

(UPDATE: MAY 3RD 2026 - MeshyAI has been removed from Blender’s list of patrons)

My personal opinion is that AI as an Agent tool to perform tasks in Blender doesn’t sound so bad on the surface. Thereotically this would mean no generative content, no asset creation. Maybe it could be useful to perform batch operations using human language rather than script, but the cost of using such a tool kind of drowns out the usefulness in my opinion. Even if it were effective, which it is seemingly not, its only providing something you can already do for free, and at that point it feels like you’re throwing away money. By using Claude you would be restricted by their membership models as well. This isn’t even getting into the environment concerns of supporting LLMs or the political concerns of supporting anything related to Anthropic, given their history with the US Government even if that is now seemingly terminated.

I haven’t used any agentic AI tools, so I only hear the stories of AI destroying people’s entire repos and going rogue. It’s hard to take all these stories seriously though, with how many fake posts are made where an AI is prompted to “act like it’s going rogue”, or the fake moltbook situation earlier this year.

I try to take a pragmatic stance towards AI. If the tools can genuinely be used as tools and are effective and useful, then I’m willing to humor it. I’m strongly against image generation and video generation, as I believe the cost to be dramatically more expensive than text and am concerned of the environment impacts it would leave with rising power costs, and also the negative outcomes it could have for society at large, such as misinformation and harassment.

Despite this I personally see no real use in a tool like what Claude advertises. Even if it was effective, this provides very little use in my day to day workflow in Blender. Maybe that’s due to my specialization as a Character Artist, maybe environment artists or someone working on a movie would find power here. Even if it worked, even if cost wasnt a concern, and even if the political reasons to never engage with AI were ignored, it seems pretty useless.

Somewhat interestingly, Unity I believe was investing in a similar AI tool that would allow you to prompt an AI to spawn gameobjects and place them around the environment. I dont know how far that really went, I think I saw this roughly 2-3 years ago, but it didn’t seem that useful then either.

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To be honest, I kinda stopped paying attention to him since he was on the last big bandwagon, crypto. I just find him a way too gullible person, to be honest.

I do really think it’s important to push back against AI in creativity (code included). It seriously is going to create a huge issue in the future legally in addition to increased cost once these models are not subsidized anymore. That’s leaving out all the ethical issues…

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update! meshy.ai is no longer listed as a corporate patron either. so theyre being consistent which is nice. curious to see how strong this stance on AI will stand in the longterm.

(Before)
https://x.com/slavoartist/status/2050576251618738582?s=20

(After)
https://x.com/IsThisA3DModel/status/2050715986597163096?s=20

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It seems like Blender Foundation is taking the issue seriously, which is good to see.

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I’m very much opposed to corporate control of AI (and the implicit goal of replacing workers that comes with corporate ownership).

Ultimately I think that the desire to make assets 100% with AI comes from the commodification of art. If art is a product where the goal is to ship and make money, then using AI makes sense. If the goal of art is to encode the user’s intent, and express ourselves in a way that words can’t, then AI is inherently self-defeating because there’s no intent behind it.

That said, I also try to take a pragmatic view and use these tools to improve my quality of life, but without robbing my agency.

I wanted to create a non-slip industrial grating material and then bake it as a texture. I would have been totally lost, because I don’t know the first thing about writing shaders. I basically explained what I wanted to the best of my ability to Claude, what shader to parameters to expose. It wrote a Python script to generate the material and then another to bake it to a texture. To a 3D artist this is probably trivial, but for me it was a blocker that would have taken hours to figure out myself.

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Another thing I could see potentially being useful is cleaning up 3D models generated from photogrammetry. I have some retro hardware I scanned using RealityScan on my phone, as well as a $2,000 3D scanner. The phone scan is actually better overall (no giant gaps), but it is much noisier. I have access to an RTX 4090 and might spend a day playing around with some cleanup tools.

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So, in other words, you:

  • robbed yourself of the opportunity to learn;
  • used a corporate-owned service to non-consensually copy (i.e. steal) other people’s work, while pretending it was doing the work itself, and obfuscating the origin of said work;
  • didn’t actually create anything, missing your own stated goal;
  • could’ve searched for an existing script (with explicit consent for copying, and authorship information), searched for a tutorial, or asked a person for guidance, but decided to replace the humans instead.

You’re not really being nuanced about it; you’re constructing a narrative to make it sound less frivolous, and contradicting your own stated views in the process. It’s not dissimilar to people with harmful drug addictions justifying their continued use of the drug as something beneficial and more important than an addiction problem.

Don’t take it personally - I also don’t judge people negatively just because they have an addiction problem. Rather, I consider the justifications to be a broadly harmful point of view to hold publicly.

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I think if you want to convince others of your argument you have to tone down the contempt.

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I think I have an appropriate level of contempt for the practice you’re endorsing, given its consequences. I did not intend contempt towards you as a person, tho I did intent a strong wording to underline a rejection of your endorsement, and flaws in your argument, for other readers. That being said, you seem generally uninterested in any opposing points of view, so I’m not sure what else you’d like me to respond with.

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I’m on these forums because I like having discussions. It kinda feels like you weren’t interested in having a discussion, you just see me as an “AI chud” (my words not yours) and an easy dunk. If the goal is to convince me to change my behavior or opinions I think there’s better ways to go about it.

you seem generally uninterested in any opposing points of view

I don’t know why you think this. I’ve never interacted with you before outside of like a paragraph-long forum post.

Idk, this is just kind of an insane way to treat a stranger on what is supposed to be a friendly forum. If you actually want to have a discussion with me about why I should change my POV, I’m down, but I usually try not to engage with people who are rude.

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The community circle is still writing a code of conduct, under which the topic of AI is specifically addressed. But even so, our current guidelines ask of our users to:

@oufrost: In this conversation, you have claimed Seabass has something akin to a harmful drug addiction. This is an ad-hominem.

You also openly agreed that you wanted to display contempt for what they are doing with the intention of not actually engaging Seabass in conversation. This does not improve the discussion.

I want the forum to be a place where others feel comfortable having discussions, even for contentious topics like AI. This behavior does not help foster the positive, welcoming community we are trying to create. Please follow the guidelines the forum is currently running under.

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I’m personally not confident in the ability of AI to provide useful meshes. I haven’t done any experiments with AI generated models personally though. The results of what George Crudo did (as mentioned in the OP) and some others I’ve seen in passing, it has never provided a practical product. These generators do not stand up to real world workflows.

You do not want to be condemned to the fate of the Yandere Dev Tooth Brush. That is effectively the direction you end up when you use 3d model generation tools.

That being said, AI-Powered tools, such as retopology ones, can definitely assist in cleaning up models from sculpts or 3D scans. Retopology here is still a manual process and not a one-click solution, but from my understanding there are AI tools that make the tedious aspects such as filling, much faster without the same overhead a full on AI model or generation tool incurs. And also without prompting. Heres an example of one that looks fairly impressive: New AI Tool To Automate Creation Of Animation-Ready Retopology

I’m not a big fan of this workflow though. If you’re a solo developer looking to make 3D models yourself, I would personally avoid sculpting/retopology/3D scans for 90% of your work. You will often times be able to make these things much faster if you make the model directly, using vertex modeling techniques. This mostly goes for props. Most solo developers cannot warrant spending over an hour for common props such as a computer monitor that’s just on a desk in the background.

For more complex objects that demand a lot of focus though, it could be worth the extra hassle. But I try to minimize the number of different workflows I use so I can instead be faster and more efficient. Its kind of like cooking. You could totally buy a bunch of kitchen gadgets. But almost always it is much faster to just use a knife, and you’ll have a lot less to clean up afterwards.

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I did a bit of research. Surprisingly as of today there’s no turnkey AI retopology tools. I saw something from Nvidia but it was mostly experimental and required a ton of VRAM. I ended up just doing some manual cleanup and then passing it through a traditional CPU-based remesher, but the results weren’t great, it just distributed triangles uniformly throughout the model.

I agree, I just wanted to give it a try. I thought it would be neat to have a scene with more high-fidelity assets for the main menu, but I couldn’t get 3D scans to look good, so I just bought an asset pack, because this kind of modeling is out of my depth. I also realized that whatever your highest-fidelity asset is, everything else has to match that level of quality, otherwise it looks out of place.

I also have found that I don’t really enjoy 3D modeling in Blender. There’s a lot of complexity that I’m just not interested in learning about. I think in the future I will stick to an art style that lets me use tools that a baby could understand like: https://www.blockbench.net/

This is another thing that I learned. For my pre-rendered UI I used FreeCAD (which means terrible geometry), Blender, and then Krita for cleanup. Having so many stages made it really inconvenient. I know now that I probably want a single streamlined workflow for every asset type.

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Thanks. The internet is full of volatile responses that escalate from 0-100 and it’s something that I am also trying to unlearn. I have limited the places where I post and interact specifically so I can get away from unproductive discourse.

We are also all in the process of learning and so I try to give people grace (if they are acting in good faith) because people usually don’t change their opinions from moral arguments, I have found that people usually only change their opinions through learned experience.

@outfrost I do think you raise some valid points. I think AI usage is problematic in the same way that eating meat, driving a car, buying things from Amazon, having a smartphone, supporting the US military, and owning stocks are problematic. But in order to exist in this world without constantly self-flagellating or feeling guilty, you have to figure out how to coexist with all this stuff. Some things are hard red lines for me, others are not (I will never directly or indirectly support the military, however sometimes I do eat meat and order stuff from Amazon).

I would agree that this is a form of rationalization/compartmentalization, but unless I join an Amish community I’m going to have to rationalize my actions or go insane.

Also I would argue that most of us have some kind of addiction that we rationalize. Maybe not the clinical definition of addiction, but in the sense that there is some negative ritual we participate in because it provides us temporary relief. That’s also the nature of living in the 21st century.

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I suppose the counterargument to that is that anything you can do with generative AI you can do better by not using AI. Furthermore, it’s important to recognize that AI is heavily subsidized. Even non-excessive use of coding assistants can land you in the hole for thousands of dollars a month.

In short, I think it’s much easier to avoid than buying things from Amazon, having a smartphone, etc. You have to go out of your way (and dig deep in your pocket) to use it. I’ve managed to get this far without using generative AI in anything I do. That is not to brag, but more to emphasize that it was quite straightforward to avoid.

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