These AI companies need to be kept away from Open Source projects. A sad day for Blender :(
Weird attitude when 3D artists LOVE AI powered denoising and upscaling. Praying for the day AI makes it so I never have to UV unwrap a mesh again.
Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
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Re: Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#72That's already blowing up on Mastodon. Blenderartist silent for now. Won't stay like that for very long. I wonder, if Ton was involved in that decision, or if it's only Francesco. Could turn out to be a very unlucky start into the leadership role.
Aha - so that decision was not a consensus or community made one? I really don't know right now; no clue about the internals at blender. But that would be interesting ... I can see the headlines "Blender community sold to Anthropic. Forks starting in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ..."
I doubt a fork would ever happen, Blender, being computer graphics software, has a huge knowledge gap between it's developers and it's users.
Re: Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#73> improve foundational features like the Blender Python API, which enables developers and artists alike So they want claude to be able to talk to blender
There's already an MCP for it, saw a post on LinkedIn the other day about it. Not sure if this one was the one I saw, but Google gave me this one. You could use Claude Code to build things with Blender. https://blender-mcp.com/
You don't even need that, if your agent/harness can evaluate Python, it can trivially access the API through there and "import" basically.
Re: Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#74I've been using Claude with OpenSCAD to generate some simple models with repetitive geometry (a set of d8 dice with braille on them for a scrabble-like game for blind children). It's really good, though often I have to send a screenshot to Claude or describe a geometry issue. Having more native integration into Blender, which I'm already much more familiar with, will be fantastic.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would appreciate hearing more about that game :)
This[0] is the original game. I downloaded the dice, made a list of letters for each die (I can't remember if I did this manually, I don't see a published list so I must have), and then I fiddled until I got something that looks decent and also printable. Each die face has the braille letter as well as a small English letter. Here's[1] my repo, I wasn't intending to make it public yet, so it still has the original creator's files in there and the README is autogenerated.
The biggest challenge at this point is figuring out how to make the dice print consistently. With each die face only having a few points of contact, they keep unsticking. What I'm trying now is cutting the dice in half, printing the halves, and then sticking them together with dowels.
[0] https://www.printables.com/model/821177-octobabble-a-word-ba...
Re: Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#75Not sure why this is getting backlash. Just look at https://fund.blender.org . Other corporate sponsors are Google, Meta, Nvidia, Netflix, even Adidas. This just means more support for a major OSS project.
A lot of those companies likely sponsor it because they use it themselves, and actively benefit from its continued development. The incentives are at least somewhat aligned. I doubt Anthropic has much use for such a tool internally. They're sponsoring it because they want to inject their slop into it and replace the people who do use it.
> They're sponsoring it because they want to inject their slop into it and replace the people who do use it.
Oh, noes, the horrors of democratising access to an expert tool. What will onshape do now, that the free one is accessible to oom more regular people that could use a 3d shape but don't have the time to learn a very complicated yet powerful tool?
I guess people have said the same about game engines / coding tools that help artists turn their vision into working, compiling games, right? Riiight?
Re: Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#76Can you imagine going to a football match and second-guessing which are the players who look human, but skin-deep are actually androids made at a factory? This is what it feels like with music and literature right now with so much AI. There are some pockets where you still can say "that's human-made", like 3D-rendered feature films with some particular artistic direction. That, it seems, AI companies also want it to…
The pearl clutching over the pedigree of art is getting tiring. No one has really ever cared. Most mainstream music is written by corporate teams. Elvis didn't write his own music. Frank Sinatra didn't write his own music. Nearly all pop artists don't. But suddenly, people are now clamoring for art, but they never gave a shit to begin with. Most people can't tell AI written music from anything else if a human perform…
It’s subjective, because it’s art. There’s no right answer.
If you like listening to AI generated content, then that’s fine! I’m glad you found something you enjoy.
For me, I consume art because I want to understand other people. For example, when I go to an art museum I want to emotionally connect with the artist: to feel what they were feeling, or understand an idea they’re conveying. I have little desire to emotionally connect with stochastic token sampling. It seems a vapid way to spend time
Re: Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#77Any ideas why anthropic is interested in blender funding?
When in doubt, dogfooding: "make us popular with the Internet crowd, take a look at what popular companies have done. Here's a budget you can use"
Chances are they were expecting the agent to spoon-feed hundreds of influencers.
Re: Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#78Will Blender start allowing Anthropic to train on your art automatically unless you opt-out?
There's absolutely no precident for Blender Foundation sponsorships leading to such things... So no, they probably won't do that.
Re: Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron
#79> improve foundational features like the Blender Python API, which enables developers and artists alike So they want claude to be able to talk to blender
This might actually be quite nice - the Blender Python API is currently very useful and very touchy. Lots of differences in behavior in headless mode which are hard to debug (because you can't open the GUI to see what's happening, because that changes the behavior).
Yes the blender API feels like it sits on top of the GUI rather than the GUI on top of the API. When you are writing scripts in the blender api you basically mechanically describe the steps you would take in the UI. It can be a little fragile at times.
I've used Claude to write some blender scripts and it's an excellent use case. I look forward to even better claude/blender interaction based on this annonuncement.