Can Claude Code get a job as a 3D animator?

Related post: Can Claude Code get a job as an ML engineer?

I’ve been interested in 3D animation, and particularly in Blender, for a number of years. Earlier this year, as Claude Code has exponentially lowered the barriers for creating anything code-based, I came up with a hypothesis: since Claude Code is excellent at Python coding, I reasoned, and since Blender animation is accessible via a powerful Python API, Claude Code should be able to code up some impressive 3D animations in Blender based on a natural language prompt. Potentially (I speculated) Claude Code should allow any amateur animator to create animations as impressive as anything a professional animator could come up with, without having to spend months or years mastering the dark arts of Blender animation. Sounds reasonable, right?

To test this theory, I coded up Smoothie, a Blender add-on that comes with an agentic AI assistant that look in your Blender project and write and run code. (Technical note: Smoothie is powered by Claude Agent SDK, which means that the assistant is an instance of Claude Code, giving us all the agentic powers of Claude Code from within Blender itself.) I then started using Smoothie to generate short animations. Later I switched to using working with Claude Code directly using Blender MCP, the MCP server developed by users in the Blender developer community and officially promoted by the Blender Foundation and Anthropic. Incidentally, the Blender MCP server was not yet available when I created Smoothie, and offers essentially the same functionality. I take some satisfaction in being able to claim I had the idea first. 🙂

This experimentation has been a lot of fun and taught me interesting things about Claude's potential in doing 3D animation. I'll describe a recent experiment that illustrates my findings: "meerkat showcase". In this project, told Claude Code I wanted to create animations involving a family of animated meerkats, and wanted the animations to be as polished and realistic as possible. I asked it to propose several approaches to achieve this goal, and to try all of them (using subagents for efficiency). Claude Code happily set to work, producing showcase animations involving four different methods for meerkat generation: purely code-based procedural generation, downloading existing models made by users in the Blender community, using an AI mesh-generation service, and a hybrid approach combining procedural generation with Blender's Rigify add-on.

Drawing on lessons from earlier Blender experiments, this time I specifically instructed Claude Code to take its time and focus on producing the highest quality results. I was happy to wait a few hours or even a day or two to see the best meerkat animations it could come up with. After it produced the first showcase animation, I iterated several times, giving it feedback on the generated animations and what I wanted improved. Each time I requested that the next time around it should spend even more time and more effort than before to produce a better version.

Here is a screenshot from the meerkat animation Claude Code produced (after several "human in the loop" iterations). You can see the full animation here.

Lessons learned

My overall conclusion is that Claude Code may be an excellent Python and bpy programmer, but as of today it isn’t an especially capable 3D animator. I’ve been dreaming of a day when I could write a script for a 3D animated feature film, give it to Claude Code, and a week later receive a Disney-quality (or even just passable quality) Blender-produced realization of the script generated autonomously by the AI. Well, that day seems far off; even with Claude Fable, the most powerful publicly available Claude-family AI model today, it is currently a struggle to create rigged animations involving animals or other complicated 3D models that can be used for anything other than passing self-amusement. To be clear, the meerkat animation is amusing to watch and has some fun elements that could perhaps used by a human animator to create something interesting, but it is buggy (even after I pointed out the bugs to Claude Code and asked it to fix them) and just plain lacking in realism and finesse.

Why can't Claude Code do 3D animation well?

It seems instructive to try to understand why Claude Code doesn't do very well with 3D animation when it can perform a lot of other coding-related tasks at a remarkably high — in many ways, super-human — level. What went wrong in the formulation of my "Claude Code can be a great 3D animator" hypothesis? I can think of two important factors at play here:

• Coding abilities are not enough. While Blender's bpy API puts all the potential power of Blender within programmatic access, animation is a highly visual process depending on both visual instincts and strong spatial and geometric reasoning abilities. And although I know from some of my mathematics-related work that Claude and ChatGPT do have an impressive understanding of geometry, and can solve difficult geometry problems that require complex reasoning and calculations, those capabilities are difficult to harness for animation work. As an example, in my iterations of the meerkat animation showcase, Claude Code initially had meerkats crossing through each other and at times crossing through the terrain they were walking on. When I pointed this out, Claude Code was able to avoid these issues by adding heuristics that made certain simplifying assumptions about the region of space occupied by a meerkat, but this wasn't easy, and was a clunky workaround for a problem that a human animator would be easily able to solve just using their eyesight. (In fact, this is a reminder that computer graphics and animation are a source of some quite challenging computational mathematics problems. There are entire research areas in computational geometry focused on solving such problems.)

• No feedback loop. A key insight about what makes Claude Code-style agentic AI systems so powerful is their ability to combine reasoning, tools that enable useful work, and tools that enable review of the work done. The combination of these capabilities creates a feedback loop that can produce very high quality output through autonomous runs and makes it possible for models to reduce hallucination and missteps. The theoretical model underlying this agentic behavior is the so-called ReAct (Reason+Act), described in the classic ReAct paper from ICLR 2023.
  In the context of animation, a fundamental difficulty is that Claude Code can code up animations, but has no effective ability to gauge the quality of its own work. I observed this on multiple occasions when time after time Claude Code created animations based on my requests that were buggy, had rigged models walking backwards or sideways, had objects crossing each other, and had other issues that were impossible for the AI to detect. Thus, I believe that, separately from the challenges of spatial and geometric reasoning, the lack of a feedback loop is a key difficulty that will need to be resolved in order for AI to make progress in autonomous animation creation.

Silver linings

Despite the above negative verdict, I should emphasize that I still find the idea of doing animation with Claude Code (or other AI coding tools) as an intriguing idea that has a lot of merit. Some of the reasons to be positive about this idea include:

• It's a lot of fun. In the past when I've tried to use Blender to generate 3D graphics and animations (including using it successfully a few years ago to design a cover for my book), I have always found the process tedious and frustrating in the extreme, due to the steep learning curve and the need to learn many technical commands, keyboard shortcuts, menus, and so on. Claude Code changes this state of affairs dramatically: my impression is that, whatever your level of skill as a Blender user, Claude Code is a fun Blender assistant that can take away a lot of this tediousness. It can serve as a tutor/help center, quickly answering any question about shortcuts and commands; and it can turbocharge your Blender session and help you do things with relatively little effort that would previously have required a major investment of time or that would be entirely out of the reach of your current abilities. This turns a painful process into something a lot more enjoyable.

• It's useful. Separately from the issue of fun, the same qualities that make Claude Code a fun 3D animation assistant also mean that, while Claude Code by itself is not quite capable as an autonomous animator, I believe that even with its current abilities it can still serve as an extremely useful and capable collaborator in the 3D animation process.

• AI models are improving. With the current rate of improvement of AI models and their capabilities, it isn't far-fetched to imagine that the situation with AI-assisted 3D animation will look very different in a year or two. Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, has advised software developers to build for the AI models of six months from now. In the case of 3D animation specifically I think it will take a bit longer, but the trajectory is clear.

A more general lesson

In my earlier post, Can Claude Code get a job as an ML engineer?, I discussed a technical area of activity where Claude Code does in fact appear to have very impressive abilities. It's interesting to observe that while in 3D animation the picture is different, the experience of trying to get Claude Code to help you with either Machine Learning or animation work is superficially similar: that is, Claude Code will appear to be similarly enthusiastic and confident in its abilities to help with whatever task you ask it to perform. Only the outcome in one of these cases is actually very good, and in the other case it is disappointing.

This relates to the notion of jagged intelligence (a term coined by Andrej Karpathy): the sometimes disorienting way in which AI models seem exceptionally good at some tasks, and mediocre or even bad at others, all while appearing to believe that they are good at, well, everything. (In fairness to Claude Code, in some of my conversations with it about animation, it did warn me that it would not be able to produce animations at the level that a skilled human animator could achieve; I found this feat of humility and self-awareness endearing.) The general lesson here is that you shouldn't assume that just because you were impressed with Claude Code's superhuman coding abilities, and with its skill and knowledge about a multitude of other things, that it would also be equally skilled at any type of task you set to it. It's an easy trap to fall into, and a reminder that the heuristics we humans apply to judge competence when dealing with other humans do not necessarily work as well when applied to AIs.