Claude Blender Skills

Free Claude skills that make realistic Blender animations. Each one is the complete workflow behind one of my YouTube videos, with the real scripts that made the shot. Install a skill, tell Claude your idea, and it plans, builds, lights, animates and renders the scene in your Blender. You don't need to watch the videos first.

Contents

• What you need
• Install
• Quick start: your first shot
• How Claude controls Blender
• The skills in detail
• Rules that make it look real
• Render without losing a night
• Safety
• FAQ
• Credits

What you need

• Claude. Claude Code works best, because Claude can run the scripts and look at the renders itself. The workflows also work in a normal Claude chat: Claude writes the scripts, you run them.
• Blender 4.4 or newer (everything was made on Blender 5.2), free from blender.org.
• A GPU for Cycles. All three films were rendered on one NVIDIA RTX 5070 (12 GB). Smaller GPUs work, renders just take longer.
• Python 3 and ffmpeg on your PATH. numpy and scipy for the physics and sound steps of blender-film.
• Your own assets: a city or environment pack you own, or free CC0 assets from Poly Haven. No paid add-ons are needed.

Install

Claude Code (recommended)

Windows (PowerShell):

git clone https://github.com/mromidev/claude-blender-skills.git
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force "$HOME\.claude\skills" | Out-Null
Copy-Item -Recurse -Force claude-blender-skills\skills\* "$HOME\.claude\skills\"

macOS / Linux:

git clone https://github.com/mromidev/claude-blender-skills.git
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r claude-blender-skills/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

Restart Claude Code. The skills load by themselves when you ask for "a cinematic Blender shot", "a realistic forest in Blender", "a short film in Blender", or any single step ("night lighting for my city", "a clay build-up reveal").

Claude app (claude.ai / desktop)

If your Claude app lets you add custom skills, zip one skill folder (for example skills/blender-film) and upload it there.

Any chat, no install

Open a skill's SKILL.md, copy all of it into a new Claude chat, then describe your idea. Add the scripts you need from that skill's scripts/ folder when Claude asks for them.

Quick start: your first shot

1. Install the skills (above).

2. Make a project folder, for example ~/blender-film, and open Claude Code in it.

3. Open Blender. In the Scripting tab, open tools/bridge.py from the blender-film skill and press Run Script. Blender now listens on 127.0.0.1:9876 (only your own PC can reach it).

4. Paste this into Claude Code:

   Use the blender-film skill. My idea: [a drone flying through a canyon at sunset / a car chase at night / ...].
   My assets: [what you have, or "free Poly Haven assets"]. Start with step 1: write the storyboard and wait for my approval.
   

5. Approve the storyboard, then let Claude go step by step. After each step it renders a small test still so you can check it. It asks before any long render.

How Claude controls Blender

Claude Code  --python tools/send.py script.py-->  bridge.py inside your open Blender (127.0.0.1:9876)
     ^                                                         |
     +---------------- output, errors, test renders <----------+

• tools/bridge.py runs inside Blender and executes the Python it receives on Blender's main thread.
• tools/send.py sends a script file (python tools/send.py scripts/06_night.py) or one line (python tools/send.py -c "print(bpy.data.filepath)") and prints what came back.
• You watch every change happen in your own Blender window. Long renders run in background Blender (blender -b) from a saved file.

The skills in detail

blender-film: night FPV drone shot

1. Storyboard first. A 10-second shot list with timings, camera per shot, where the hero is. Turned into one image sheet.
2. City. 5 buildings from an asset pack copied, stretched and recoloured into 173 instances. Cars, lamps, trees, hydrants.
3. Motion from physics. A point-mass simulation (24 fps, 1/480 s steps, gravity, quadratic air drag, ropes that can't stretch) searches the anchor timings until the path threads the street. Path curve + empty on Follow Path, offset keyed every frame.
4. Hero and the pivot. The first hero was a rigged Spider-Man with Mixamo motion capture. It looked stiff, because mocap is recorded on the ground. Swapped for an FPV drone on the same path: thrust axis = acceleration + gravity, nose along the velocity, throttle cuts where the path is ballistic, power flip, barrel roll, back flip, braking flare into a hover.
5. Realism pass. AgX exposure, thin haze, asphalt wear, oil drip line, repair patches, dirt at the foot of every wall.
6. Night. Practical lights only. Windows found from the facade roughness map (glass is smooth): roughness < 0.3 = glass, then a random subset lit warm, cool or off. LED street lamps at 3200 K, car lights, red signals, blue fog, wet asphalt.
7. Camera. Camera Shakify (real recorded shake) on every camera, a street-level lens 0.45 m above the wet road, bloom and slight barrel distortion, no colour grade.
8. Sound from the motion. The animation is read every frame (distance, radial speed, side, throttle). Throttle drives motor pitch, radial speed drives Doppler, side drives the pan, cars pass at their closest approach, street-canyon reverb. -14 LUFS.
9. Render. Tree LODs and hidden duplicates removed, six final-quality test stills first, only the frames of the edit rendered, resumable, with a progress panel. About 3.5 hours overnight. Then every frame is checked.
10. Clay build-up. The whole city in white clay drops from the sky piece by piece (507 pieces, 7 s), then one wipe to night.

Full step list and all 20 scripts: skills/blender-film.

blender-forest: realistic environment from a tutorial

1. Give Claude a long tutorial (1 h+, free assets) instead of a prompt: "We are going to recreate his scene exactly."
2. Claude reads the transcript, captures the reference frames, writes PLAN.md with every shot and stage.
3. Every downloaded asset is checked: virus scan, archive listing, .blend files opened with --disable-autoexec and audited.
4. The world is built in stages: terrain + HDRI world, our own Geometry Nodes scatter (560k-730k instances, replaces a paid add-on), gravel path, then a test still next to the reference after every stage.
5. Our own car rig (wheels spin with distance, front wheels steer, body bounce) instead of a rig add-on.
6. A sub-agent measures each reference shot (height, lens, fisheye, speed, cuts); cameras are built from those numbers.
7. Render benchmark: 128 samples + denoise = same look as 256 samples, 51 s -> 28 s a frame. 390 frames at 2560x1440 in about 3 hours.

Full steps and scripts: skills/blender-forest.

blender-car-film: 20-second story film

1. Storyboard: 6 shots, no people, every shot with camera move, timing and key sound.
2. Real car model (CC BY), Poly Haven trees and props; road, snow banks, school, hospital and house built by Claude in Python.
3. 17 numbered scripts sent live into Blender through the bridge: world, car, rig, set, house, animation, snow and fog, cameras, fixes, render settings, grade, 30 fps.
4. Render from a 5-8 hour estimate to about 1 hour: adaptive sampling + OptiX denoise, fewer bounces, snow particles baked to disk (158 s -> 6 s a frame), culling. A resumable render queue with a progress window.

Full steps and scripts: skills/blender-car-film.

Rules that make it look real

• Storyboard before Blender. Every later decision gets checked against it.
• Real assets, not generated ones. Claude is great at code, cameras, physics and render settings. Let downloaded models and real recorded sounds do the rest.
• Motion from physics, not hand-keyed curves. Real speed, real gravity, real braking.
• At night, practical lights light the scene, not the sky.
• Tiny imperfections: dirt at wall bases,