Simon Willison shows coding agents can now drive Blender to render scenes on macOS
dotey · x · 2026-09-07
Simon Willison documents how modern frontier models have gotten really good at using Blender. In a TIL post, he shows ChatGPT Codex on a Mac driving the desktop Blender app via its Python API: models can produce editable .blend files, render images, and even movies (rendering frame sequences combined with ffmpeg).
His workflow:
- Install the full Mac app from blender.org
- Prompt: "Use the already installed /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle"
- Iterate with "add a background and a lot of flair" and "make it a whole lot better"
The result, riffing on his classic pelican-riding-a-bicycle benchmark, shows coding agents doubling as automation drivers for desktop 3D software.
Related event: Simon Willison Shows Codex Can Drive Blender Without MCP(3 posts)→
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