Using Blender with coding agents on macOS

Modern frontier models have got really good at using Blender. I've been having a lot of fun trying this out recently - models can produce .blend files you can edit in Blender itself, and can also render images and even movies (by rendering a sequence of images and combining them with ffmpeg).

Setting this up, at least on macOS, is really easy. Install the Blender desktop app from blender.org and then tell the coding agent:

Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle

That worked for me with GPT-6 Astra. You can also be a bit more explicit, to save the model some time figuring out how to use it:

Use Blender like this: /Applications/Blender.app/Contents/MacOS/Blender --background --python scene.py

I used GPT-6 Astra (Medium) in the ChatGPT macOS application, Codex mode:

Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle

2m39s later:

pelican-bicycle.blend, pelican_scene.py

OK add a background and a lot of flair

3m51s later:

pelican-bicycle-festival.blend, pelican_flair.py

OK make it a whole lot better

5m59s later:

pelican-coastal-parade.blend, pelican_final.py

The project lives in this repo, and here's the exported transcript from Codex.

Codex makes it pretty easy to create skills (using its built-in skill creating skill), so I finished up by prompting:

Create a quick skill that describes how to use the currently installed /Application/Blender based on what you learned

It produced and installed this Markdown skill, which I have since used for further Blender experiments with prompts like this:

Use your Blender Local skill to build this scene (attached image)

Created 2026-09-05T08:42:28-07:00, updated 2026-09-05T08:47:13-07:00 · History · Edit