blender-claymation

A skill for Claude that makes stop-motion claymation films in Blender from a single prompt.

“can you make a stop motion claymation video (~20 seconds) of a little penguin who lives in an igloo?”

Claude plans a beat sheet, builds a tabletop miniature and a clay puppet in Python, and animates it “on twos” at 12 fps with hand-made boil and light flicker. It renders with Cycles, checks the frames, and hands you an mp4 (or a video player artifact).

Install

Claude Code:

git clone https://github.com/angrypenguinpng/blender-claymation-skill ~/.claude/skills/blender-claymation

Then ask for a claymation in any session.

Requirements:

• Blender 4.2+ (tested on 5.2): brew install --cask blender on macOS, snap install blender --classic on Linux.
• ffmpeg.
• A GPU helps a lot. Cycles auto-selects Metal, OptiX, CUDA, HIP or oneAPI.

On an Apple M4 Pro a 20 s film renders in about 25 minutes at 1600×900.

Run the examples yourself

scripts/blender.sh examples/igloo.py --still 120 --res 960 540 --samples 32   # one test frame
scripts/blender.sh examples/igloo.py --res 1600 900 --samples 80              # full 240 frames -> renders/igloo/
scripts/encode.sh renders/igloo out/igloo.mp4                                 # 24 fps mp4 with grain + vignette

What’s inside

SKILL.md                    the workflow Claude follows
scripts/claylib.py          clay material, lumpy primitives, lights, camera, easing, boil, CLI
scripts/blender.sh          find Blender and run a scene headless
scripts/encode.sh           frames -> mp4
scripts/contact_sheet.sh    frames -> one review image
scripts/obs.js, record_window.sh   optional OBS screen recording of the result (macOS)
examples/                   two complete films to copy from
assets/player.html          video player page for an artifact
references/look-guide.md    the numbers behind the clay look
references/recording-demo.md

Inspired by Alex Albert’s post showing Claude making claymations in Blender from one prompt.

MIT licensed.