Blender MCP and The Future Of Creative Tools - Siddharth Ahuja

Hey everyone, this is Siddharth. Welcome to my talk about the Blender MCP. Uh, for those of you who don't know what Blender is or MCP is, I'm going to go through it in a bit, but I'm going to talk about how my experience was building this, what I learned, and where I see it going forward.

Uh, especially for more creative tools, even outside of Blender. So, maybe a little bit about me before we start. I've been a designer and an engineer for about 8 years now. I just like tinkering with stuff. I ran my own product studio for a while, and this Blender MCP was a result of some experimentation.

Um, just— but just before we jump into it, you know a lot of you might be asking, "What is Blender?" So Blender is just a 3D tool. Think of it as a generalist 3D tool. You can import assets, you can animate them, you can export them out to, like, a game engine.

So you can do all sorts of stuff. In Blender you can create art,right, and the UI kind of looks like this. It's pretty complex if you see all the different tabs everywhere. Uh, on the top over here there's a bunch of things, on theright over here there's a bunch of things.

Each of these has, like, 10 tabs inside it. So it gets pretty complex, which is the reason I myself could never be a good 3D artist. I was too lazy to go through all of these different tabs. And, uh, I guess that was kind of my motivation when I saw MCP.

And, uh, I saw that MCP could let your LLM talk to any tool. My first response was, "Oh wait, will this make Blender easier?" You know, will this make a historically complex tool easy to use? And so, just to give you an idea of how it used to be, or even still is, it takes 5 hours to build this doughnut.

And this is a very classic beginners course that even I did. But, uh, this is the status quo,right? It takes 5 hours to go through this and build a tutorial. And it should not be this hard,right? And so the whole idea behind Blender MCP, uh, is essentially to let your LLM, like Claude or ChatGPT or whatever,right, let them talk to Blender, which is a complex tool, and let the LLM control Blender so that it can make 3D scenes for you and you just have to prompt.

So in this example, this is a demo I posted. Essentially I'm just saying, "Make a dragon,right, have it guard a pot of gold," and let's see what it does.

Right, so you can see it kind of gets the brief, but also not the best. But it, it made an isometric room, it has a dragon, it kind of gave it wings, there's a pot of gold. It, it made it in, what, I think about 5 minutes.

I would have taken a lot longer to do something like this, to be honest. Uh, so this is, this is where I think I'm going to talk about it a little bit more. So Blender MCP launched to about 11 and a half stars on GitHub at this moment.

Uh, and it has almost, I think, way more than 160k plus downloads. A lot of people have used it, a lot of people have built on top of it, and I'll show some examples in a bit. But how, how does it work exactly,right?

So it's actually way more straightforward than it seems. So it's just, essentially, your client, which is Claude or Cursor or whatever, it connects to Blender through the MCP protocol,right? If you haven't seen what an MCP is, I feel like a lot of people have been talking about it, even in this conference itself.

But it helps you. It's just a standardized protocol that allows Blender to show to the client, "Oh, this is what I can do." Like, so that's the tools part of the MCP, that, "Oh, these are the tools I have, and this is what I can do."

And so the LLM understands that and then uses those tools. So how it uses those tools is, in Blender there's an add-on that I've made, uh, to execute the scripts that the LLM tells it to. So for example, Claude will say, "Make a dragon," and it will call the exactright tools to make those, make that dragon in Blender.

Another big part of it is the assets,right? So the industry standard, like Rodin, which is an AI-generated asset, Sketchfab and PolyHaven, things like that are now connected to the LLM. And that can basically now seamlessly, if you write a prompt to generate an asset inside Blender, it can just do that,right?

So the client does all the heavy lifting, essentially. Yeah, so I think Blender is a pretty big part. I think the reason this is possible in the first place is because Blender has scripting,right? So code can be executed inside Blender, which is a big part.

Blender is pretty flexible with also downloading assets and importing, and so that makes the life, like, much easier, honestly. With assets, yeah, I think the cool thing here is that this is just the start, but clients can connect to any API.

So for example,right now, you can write any prompt you want and it will get theright asset for you. You can say, "I want a zombie," and it will get theright asset for you. AI-generated on the spot. You can describe it however you want.

And then the client is kind of the orchestrator,right? So the cool thing about this is, I think, that you can use it in any tool you want. You know, it could be Claude, it could be Cursor, it could be Windsurf, Kline, whatever you like.

Uh, and you can use any language you want with it,right? You can use, uh, Claude and ChatGPT and Gemini and whatever you like. So I think this is how it broadly functions together. If you want more detail, there's always the GitHub.

But, uh, I think some learnings while I was making this was that a tool with scripting can remove a lot of the heavy lifting. Like I mentioned the Blender thing,right? Because Claude is good at writing code, it can very easily translate it to Blender, and Blender can execute that code.

And that can be for modeling, for getting theright assets, anything. Um, the second part I learned was that MCPs get really confused with tools. So I learned this the hard way, where I had to refactor the Blender MCP quite a few times because I had about, I think, 14 or 15 tools, and it kept getting confused on what to use.

So tools can be something like, "Create a cube," "Create a sphere," "Execute code," uh, "Get this asset from Rodin," for example,right? So how does it know which one to choose? Because it's a little bit non-deterministic,right? So in that case, it's always better to kind of keep the end user experience in mind and making sure it's really lean.

And every single tool is different from each other so that Claude knows exactly which tool to pick. Um, and a good segue from that is, don't bloat the UX just because you can. I think this is more a learning from making it open source, which is just, I think there's a lot of features that can be added, but I think the reason Blender MCP works is because it's lean and a bit of a generalist tool, so it can get a lot done.

And another learning has been that the models do get better, the underlying models. So while 3D models aren't great yet, and LLMs have a very poor understanding of 3D in general, they're getting way better. So even in the time I released it to the time it was out, Gemini 2.5 came out, and that made it already 3x better,right?

So I think those are some things to keep in mind when I'm building, at least, the next MCP. Now, sure, now I've put this out in the wild, and now comes the creative tools part,right? What's, what's changed? Uh, how are people using it?

So historically, like I said, it's been pretty complex to use 3D tools, and now suddenly the barrier of access has reduced. And so this is a scene I made in 2 minutes, you know, just got theright assets, AI-generated all of them.

These assets don't exist otherwise, they're all AI-generated. And just place them, tell Claude how to place it, tell them, "I need a magical mushroom," and it just creates everything from scratch, and I can just take a picture of it, essentially.

This is, uh, another one

where this is another one where they're creating a cat, and they're also getting all theright AI-generated assets, and then they animated it a little bit to make it feel real. And you can do all this in less than an hour now, where this would have taken way more time earlier,right?

This is another one where they're providing reference images,right? So they just gave an image of a living room, and now it's recreating that, getting all theright assets. Again, this would have taken quite a long time earlier to just make this, but now it's a matter of minutes.

Some other cool things, this person on Twitter, they're generating terrain, so they have an image which they gave to the Blender MCP. Uh, and inside Cursor, they're trying to create, create this game on Blender. And so it generates theright terrain for you.

It even uses these nodes,right, which is, which itself has a learning curve to set up these really complex textures and normal bumps and so on. And so it does that, all of that for you, just because Blender can execute code,right?

This is, I love this one. This is a game that someone created. This is essentially, the idea is that they go into someone's lungs and they have to collect bone fragments, um, to, to win the game, to connect the ribcage together.

And so Blender MCP, again, was used to set the scene to create assets. I'll just play it shortly.

Yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Um, so you can create games now. And this is, uh, completely done in Blender MCP. It's a pretty high fidelity, uh, you know, glossy, this iridescent material and a camera animation, all done in minutes by just prompting through AI,right?

Uh, so these are the things that are being unlocked. Um, this is, uh, another cool thing that I saw that people have been using it for. So this person prompted the MCP to create a racing track and then animate the cars.

So you can see on the side the MCP is running, and, uh, on theright side this Blender is running, essentially. And so this person created this, and now you can see, if I skip to the end a little bit, this person now placed the camera angle such that the cars feel like they're, feel like a movie, and then they used Runway to convert them to an actual clip.

So here, here you can see it. Whoops.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, so they animated the camera, and now this is through Runway. So it's another medium that's been unlocked, basically, where your even filmmakers or creators, all kinds of creators can use this, not just 3D artists.

And this is just an example of some doughnuts, which are one-shot prompts. This is just, you know, like, in a minute. Uh, it can maybe, maybe, uh, made way better, of course. But, uh, you know, as a start, from 5 hours to a minute is not too bad.

So this is essentially unlocking a whole new world of creators to just come in, and when the barrier has been so high, now it's just gone, and you can just write what you want, what's in your head, and get there with just enough prompting,right?

And so I think in general, in a broader sense, MCPs are changing how creative tools work. And, um, just an example of that, I was trying to experiment with this a little bit. We were talking about the client,right, being the orchestrator, where it talks to external sources like the API, it talks to local tools like Blender.

So what if we extend that analogy a little bit, and the client orchestrates between all these different things? So let's say the user wants to make a game, and people don't come in with the intent of learning Unity,right?

They want to make a game, and people don't come in with the intent of learning Ableton, which is a music creation software. They come in with the intent of making music. So how do we capture that intent and then transform it so that this person doesn't have to worry about the underlying tools, but also it can match their vision?

So I feel like MCPs are going to be a fundamental glue that holds this thing together, and these LLMs are going to be at the center, at the intelligence, uh, at the center of it,right? So for example, let's say I want to make a game.

So I tell it, "Oh, I want to make a game," and, uh, this, this LLM is all they interface with,right? And this LLM can then call Blender and make an asset for the game, theright assets. It can then call Unity and make a whole game engine.

Unity is a game engine, and so it can put it in, add collisions, add logic, and make a whole game out of it. It can call theright APIs to get theright assets and animate it and stuff like that.

And it can also call Ableton, which will create the soundtrack for the characters for the game,right? So you, this person doesn't really care about everything outside of it. But now that MCP exists, the client can literally just orchestrate between all of these and, uh, choose theright tools and make a game.

So I don't think we're very far away from this, to be honest. And, uh, I made, like, a really short demo to demonstrate how it could work. So in this one, I'm creating a dragon, and I'm just asking it to give a soundtrack.

So I also created the Ableton MCP, which is what you see on the bottom left, which is essentially you can prompt to create music. So I thought, let's try and combine them and see what happens.

So you can see that it creates, it gets the dragon that I described, it creates some sinister lighting because it's supposed to be a villain, and it also calls Ableton to create a soundtrack for it. Sure, the quality might not be the best in the worldright now, but at the same time, it's, you can see it's only a matter of time before it starts stitching all these pieces together to create something insane.

So a few questions, honestly, that this brings up for me personally, is that, is it just going to be tools talking to each other now,right? Are, are people just going to interface with the LLM and don't, don't have to even worry about learning the complex UI beneath it?

Because that's what seems to be happening,right? It's a whole new group of people that can come in and create now, and they can do it without learning the UI behind it. And are creatives going to be more like orchestra conductors?

Because, because now I think, rather than knowing how to play the instrument, it's more important how to get the vision in your head and place it to the LLM so the LLM can execute it for you, and how you're conducting these different pieces that go together.

So it's an interesting time, I think, to be a creator, and MCPs are pretty muchright at the center of it. And I think some of these examples, like Blender MCP and Ableton MCP, are examples of that. And from that, there have been spurred a lot of MCPs for other creative tools, like I've seen for PostGIS, Houdini, Unity, Unreal Engine, there have been so many.

So it's only a matter of time, I feel, that, you know, this, everyone can become a creator, uh, which is pretty cool. Uh, thank you. Yeah, that's me. And, uh, yeah, you can find me on GitHub at AhujaSid, and you can find me at Twitter at, uh, SidAhuj.

Um, yeah, so thank you. Thank you for coming to this. And if you have any thoughts, please leave them in the comments. Thank you.