Crush six things under a hydraulic press in one endless take, with Blender and Cycles
A towering hydraulic press in a sunlit workshop, a conveyor feeding it six things, and one unbroken camera move that loops forever. The crayons mushroom and snap; a glass bottle bursts in extreme slow motion while the camera circles it; a superball squashes and tears; a stack of plates shatters plate by plate; a red-hot billet is forged, its scale crazing and flaking off with sparks. Then a tungsten cube: the press stalls, judders harder and harder, a relief line jets oil and blows, the pressure lets go and the cube sits there unmarked, a glint along its edge, as the camera pulls back to the opening frame. Everything is Python that Claude Code wrote for Blender: the workshop, the press, the objects, our own Voronoi fracture and physics, a speed-ramped clock, an endless-line trick that makes the last frame flow into the first, the one-take camera and the Cycles render. You get four exact prompts with a check for each, a loop test, and the complete source.
Before you start
Uses your AI plan
You’ll need
Claude Code
BlBlender
CyCycles
PyPython
FFFFmpeg
GPGPU
What it uses
4 prompts to your coding assistantCounts toward your assistant’s usual allowance. Nothing extra to buy.
The tutorial
Free with an account · 4 steps
Free with an account. Your assistant runs on the plan you already have.
The recipe
4 steps, from nothing to yours.
Every step gives you the action, the exact input (a prompt, settings or a file) and a check to compare your result against the original.
Step 01
Build the workshop, the press and the six objects
Step 02
Program the press, the clock and every crush
Step 03
Close the loop and shoot it in one take
YoursStep 04
Light, render and encode
Exactly what the creator used
Claude Code
Any recent version
Blender
Any recent version
Cycles
Any recent version
Python
Any recent version
FFmpeg
Any recent version
GPU
Any recent version
Claude Code — Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5) — wrote and ran every script — your Claude plan
Blender — 5.2.2 LTS (Linux x64 tarball, run headless with --factory-startup) — modelling, the per-frame handler, Cycles, compositor glare — free, GPL
Cycles — built into Blender 5.2.2, CUDA backend — path tracing on the GPU (OptiX failed to initialise under WSL2, CUDA works) — free
Python — Blender's bundled 3.13 for the scene; system python3 with numpy, SciPy and Pillow — the physics, the clock, the camera checks, the loop test — free
FFmpeg — 4.4.2 — master and Reels encodes, grain and vignette, contact sheet — free
GPU — NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti, 12 GB, in WSL2 on Windows — Cycles — your hardware
The final render needs about 3 GB of GPU memory per Blender process. Any CUDA card with 6 GB or more should work.
Provenance: Recorded October 6, 2026: Claude Code with Claude Opus 5.5 (claude-opus-5-5); Blender 5.2.2 LTS (Linux x64, headless, --factory-startup); Cycles on an RTX 3080 Ti with CUDA under WSL2 at 1080×1920, 30 fps, 25.0 s (750 frames), 64 max samples adaptive (threshold 0.025) with OpenImageDenoise, time-lapse shutter; render 8 hours 27 minutes (two processes, 16.7 process-hours, on a GPU shared with another job). FFmpeg 4.4.2: master 71.6 MB (CRF 15), Reels copy 39.3 MB (CRF 18, aq-mode 3, maxrate 30M, faststart), no audio. Loop test (blur sigma 2, SSIM): 0.9659 across the loop point on the frames, between its neighbours 0.9243 and 0.9785 (mean difference 2.98, between 5.12 and 1.89); 0.9647 on the Reels copy (neighbours 0.9267 and 0.9779). No external images, footage, textures, HDRIs, models or generative-media models were used.
Crush six things under a hydraulic press in one endless take, with Blender and CyclesUses your AI plan
Claude Code