I wanted to remake my 6DoF spaceship flying prototype.
What I did not want to do was model the spaceship. Manually. In Blender.
So instead of spending a month learning to model, I built a Copilot inside Blender in a day. Which is the same thing, except I still cannot model.
A chat panel in the 3D viewport sidebar. I type a sentence. The model writes Python, and it runs against my actual scene, the file open on screen, not a copy that some other process has to keep in sync.
Then I sat down and had a conversation with my own addon. Five sentences:
1. Make a scifi looking spaceship. It should look scifi-y
2. Add RCS thrusters to get 6DoF flight
3. Make the RCS thrusters match the scifi look. And also position them properly.
4. Give the entire Spaceship a nice flying animation. Make it smooth. Roll and sway.
5. Add exhaust flames to main thrusters as well as RCS thrusters. animate the RCS thrusters to fire in sync with the animated motion. they should fire the correct ones so that expected motion should happen.
15 minutes. 52 tool calls. A ship with swept wings, a tail fin and a glass canopy. Four sets of steering thrusters, 22 exhaust flames. A full flight animation.
The bit I did not expect.
It checked every one of its own thrusters to make sure nothing was in the way. Found the rear ones were firing straight into the side of the ship. So it rebuilt them, angled them outward, moved them to the wingtips, and checked them all again.
Nobody asked it to do that. It decided exhaust should not be firing into the ship it just built.
Total bill for building the tool: $7.18. 3,833 requests, 613M tokens, 97% served from cache. One spaceship: about a seventh of a cent.
Now the uncomfortable part.
I didn't model a single vertex. I didn't read Blender's addon dev docs. I didn't learn its Python API, or how to draw a panel in it. Everything the tool needed to know, it asked the running Blender instead.
I didn't learn how to build an agent harness either. I built one anyway.
I didn't become a Blender artist. I became the person who gave hands to a model.
Recently I read someone who described his new job: every spec, ticket and fix written by an AI, nobody reading any of it, twelve-hour days spent pressing enter. No sense of victory.
I know exactly what he means. I just did the same. I am not proud of the prototype. Gamedevs were known to spend time making game engines before they started making the games. Its different now. No joy.
I wanted to remake my 6DoF spaceship flying prototype.
What I did not want to do was model the spaceship. Manually. In Blender.
So instead of spending a month learning to model, I built a Copilot inside Blender in a day. Which is the same thing, except I still cannot model.
A chat panel in the 3D viewport sidebar. I type a sentence. The model writes Python, and it runs against my actual scene, the file open on screen, not a copy that some other process has to keep in sync.
Then I sat down and had a conversation with my own addon. Five sentences:
1. Make a scifi looking spaceship. It should look scifi-y 2. Add RCS thrusters to get 6DoF flight 3. Make the RCS thrusters match the scifi look. And also position them properly. 4. Give the entire Spaceship a nice flying animation. Make it smooth. Roll and sway. 5. Add exhaust flames to main thrusters as well as RCS thrusters. animate the RCS thrusters to fire in sync with the animated motion. they should fire the correct ones so that expected motion should happen.
15 minutes. 52 tool calls. A ship with swept wings, a tail fin and a glass canopy. Four sets of steering thrusters, 22 exhaust flames. A full flight animation.
The bit I did not expect.
It checked every one of its own thrusters to make sure nothing was in the way. Found the rear ones were firing straight into the side of the ship. So it rebuilt them, angled them outward, moved them to the wingtips, and checked them all again.
Nobody asked it to do that. It decided exhaust should not be firing into the ship it just built.
Total bill for building the tool: $7.18. 3,833 requests, 613M tokens, 97% served from cache. One spaceship: about a seventh of a cent.
Now the uncomfortable part.
I didn't model a single vertex. I didn't read Blender's addon dev docs. I didn't learn its Python API, or how to draw a panel in it. Everything the tool needed to know, it asked the running Blender instead. I didn't learn how to build an agent harness either. I built one anyway. I didn't become a Blender artist. I became the person who gave hands to a model.
Recently I read someone who described his new job: every spec, ticket and fix written by an AI, nobody reading any of it, twelve-hour days spent pressing enter. No sense of victory.
I know exactly what he means. I just did the same. I am not proud of the prototype. Gamedevs were known to spend time making game engines before they started making the games. Its different now. No joy.