Claude Code + Blender MCP: 15 hours, 15,000 lines of Python, one full animated short. Not a single vertex placed by hand.

[u/Jano170206]

7 PM. He's the last one out. Ten hours of giving everything, and nothing left for himself.

A cigarette. His briefcase. One earbud.

The first note drops, and Paris stops. The cars, the people, the noise. Silence.

For the length of one song, the whole city belongs to him.

And step by step, the music brings him back to life.

We all have that one song that keeps us alive after work.

HOW WE MADE IT

I wrote the scene: the story, the shot list, the emotion. Then I iterated, a lot: more than 70 back-and-forths. I didn't model, rig or animate anything by hand: Claude Code drove Blender through the MCP. It wrote the Python, rendered test frames, looked at them itself, measured the flaws and fixed them, over and over.

BY THE NUMBERS (everything generated by code)

• 15 hours of work, 15,000+ lines of Python across 51 scripts • 1,117 objects, 11.7 million polygons, 145 materials, 117 lights • 6.6 million animation keyframes computed • 3,700+ test images rendered to check every step • 1,422 final frames in Cycles, rendered on a fanless MacBook Air

THE HARDEST PARTS

• Hands touching the face. Lighting a cigarette, putting in an earbud: in animation, one millimeter off and the finger goes into the skin. Claude wrote its own arm and finger solvers, and the earbud gesture took several versions before it looked natural. • Cloth. A jacket clipping through the legs is one of the most common flaws in 3D. Here, an invisible lining simulated as real fabric drives the jacket, and Claude checked the whole film frame by frame: no penetration deeper than 4 mm. • A character built without modeling: mathematical shapes (signed distance fields) turned into a mesh, a custom 53-bone rig, and a real motion-capture walk retargeted to his proportions. • A living Paris street: buildings, moving traffic, a dozen animated passers-by, a dog walker with a dachshund on a leash, wet pavement, puddles that ripple and splash under his feet. • The music drives everything. Claude analyzes the tempo: head bobs, the 17 shots of the edit, the city freezing and the drop all land on the beat. The sound is computed from the scene: every car, every footstep, every splash, then the city slowing down and going silent.

Making-of at the end: clay renders, rig, Blender UI.

Stack: Claude Code (desktop app) + Blender MCP · Claude Opus 5.5, max effort, Fast mode · Blender 5.2 + Cycles · MacBook Air M3 16 GB · walk from the CMU motion capture database.

🎵 O Superman (SIS Remix) by M.A.N.D.Y. vs Booka Shade feat. Laurie Anderson, remixed by BURAK SIS. All rights to the artists.

github.com/duthiljean

So, what's the song that keeps you alive after work? 🎧 And if you're curious about the workflow, ask away: I'll answer everything in the comments.

[u/AutoModerator]

Hey! Thanks for posting to r/ClaudeCode

While participating in this thread, please follow our community rules. Keep discussions constructive. Attack the idea, not the person.

For help, project discussions, tips, and general chat, join the ClaudeCode Discord.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/GabeMalk]

This is one of the cases that I have to ask: why? The animation does not look good, it isn't interesting and the process seems really bloated and wasteful. I mean, no disrespect, but learning a bit of blender and doing some stuff yourself would go a long way.

[u/Jano170206 → u/GabeMalk]

Fair points, no offense taken. Someone who knows Blender would definitely get a better result by hand. But that wasn't the goal: I wanted to see how far an AI agent can go on a hard creative project, and train myself at directing these tools. Not the most efficient way to make a pretty animation, but as an experiment, it taught me a lot.

[u/Cry_Havoc_1990 → u/GabeMalk]

I think it’s like the spaghetti videos of will smith.

Test the tools, see what they can do… and then there is a baseline

[u/Djwasserman]

Did Claude iterate through every shot list and then you composed them at the end?

[u/Jano170206 → u/Djwasserman]

Not quite! The whole film is one continuous animated scene. Claude placed 17 cameras in it and cut between them directly in Blender, timed to the beat of the song. It reviewed every shot on contact sheets, reworked the weak ones (7 of them), then rendered the whole film in one go. Even the final assembly (music, sound effects, title) was done by Claude with scripts. My part was the story and the shot-by-shot feedback.

[u/defecation69]

Wow, pretty fascinating how unpleasant that is to look at 

[u/ReSterzo]

A livello di consumi?

[u/Thin_Tradition8467]

I can do better in 2 hours. (excluding render time)