Animate a one-minute 3D mascot film by scripting Blender from code

The poster ran Claude Code on Opus 5.5 inside Dodaios, an open-source project whose mascot was the subject, and gave it a single prompt plus the mascot image. The brief asked for a one-minute wordless 3D film telling the project's story, built from scratch with no Remotion, templates or video generators, and with sound taken from free professional libraries rather than generated in code. Claude Code wrote a nine-shot storyboard, then wrote Python scripts that ran Blender without its interface to build the mascot, its rig, cloth simulation, the desk world, lights and every camera move. It rendered small previews of each shot, looked at them, fixed what was off and repeated. It pulled audio from Pixabay, Mixkit and Freesound and used ffmpeg to join frames and sound.

The final film is 1,440 frames at 1080p and 24 fps, rendered with Blender's EEVEE engine on one RTX 5090 in about eight hours. The poster says it used roughly 10% of the weekly limit on a $200 plan and calls it a test of the model's 3D ability. Another commenter installed Blender after reading the thread and got a five-second dancing dog clip from a one-line request within minutes. A separate Medium write-up describes the same approach for a 98-second narrated short of a public-domain O. Henry story: 34 shots across three Blender sets, flat 2D characters placed in lit 3D rooms, made in one Claude Code session. Its author lost an hour to soft close-ups until Claude measured the focus distance and traced the cause to a transparency setting.

Results did not travel well. One commenter ran the same prompt and got what they called a middle-school Blender project, and another said posing their own rigged character went badly, with awkward poses, unwelded clothing and most of a session's tokens spent tweaking bones from screenshots. Several readers doubted the film came from one prompt alone. The poster says the prompt used the ultracode keyword.