Blender film with Claude

The workflow behind a 10-second night FPV drone shot through a city: one storyboard, a real physics path, one pivot (the first hero didn't work), night lighting, sound from the motion, a 3.5-hour render, and a clay build-up reveal. Every step below is a script in scripts/ that was actually run for that shot; names in them (Drone Empty, Street Asphalt, Building_1...) come from that scene - rename them for yours.

0. Setup

• Blender 4.4+ (made on 5.2), a GPU for Cycles, Python 3 + ffmpeg on PATH (+ numpy, scipy for the sound step).
• Live bridge (Claude drives the open Blender, you watch): in Blender's Text Editor run tools/bridge.py (listens on 127.0.0.1:9876). Then from a terminal: python tools/send.py scripts/06_night.py or python tools/send.py -c "print(bpy.data.filepath)".
• Set FILM_ROOT to your project folder (default ~/blender-film): scene/, render/, audio/, research/ live there. tools/lib.py is loaded by every script (helpers: coll(), save(), snap()...).
• Work on copies. Before replaying or re-running any script that edits materials, copy the .blend - several passes are not idempotent if a run crashes halfway (re-running orphaned node links once).

1. Storyboard first