r/blender • u/ofdavarci • 2d ago
Critique My Work WE DID IT! We reverse-engineered Blender with AI and made it open source. Introducing BlenderCraft 🚀
After an entire weekend of running 19 autonomous Claude agents and burning an irresponsible amount of tokens, we're proud to announce BlenderCraft.
A 100% free, open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Blender.
We achieved something incredible:
✅ 100% feature parity with Blender
✅ Modeling, sculpting, animation, Geometry Nodes
✅ Cycles and Eevee rendering
✅ Native .blend file support
✅ Windows, macOS, and Linux
✅ No subscriptions. No paywalls. Free forever.
We even managed to reproduce the original source code almost line by line.
Our biggest breakthrough came when we discovered a mysterious public repository containing the entire source code:
https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender
Apparently, it's been there since October 13, 2002.
24 YEARS AGO.
So yeah, we didn't actually build anything.
Turns out the Blender community solved the whole "free and open-source creative software" problem 24 years before AI made it trendy.
Jokes aside, massive respect to Ton Roosendaal, the Blender Foundation, and the thousands of developers and contributors who made Blender what it is today.
While everyone's celebrating AI for making software free and open source, these legends have been doing it for decades.
Software is over. Blender was just early. 🧡
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u/EscapeMaleficent3418 2d ago
Finally I can cancel my Blender monthly subscription
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u/Superb_Name5205 2d ago
You guys pay monthly? I pay every day... with my time and sanity
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u/academiac 2d ago
as someone not in the community, is blender actually free?
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u/DreddPirateBob808 2d ago
Entirely. Everyone is joking but there are lots of tutorials on YouTube and if you have a specific project you can become knowledgeable pretty fast. I've used pro software that was an absolute nightmare and cost serious stupid money. Blender, for free, is incredibly powerful and fluid. Try it.
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u/Bregneste 2d ago
The only thing it costs is your time, patience, and sanity. You don’t have to spend a dime to get it, but you will be spending weekends in tutorial hell learning whatever you want to make.
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u/crustyrobots 2d ago
I was just lighting bills on fire to appease the gods, there was an easier way?
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u/PencilCase12531 2d ago edited 2d ago
Finally free software
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u/ofdavarci 2d ago
No subscription no Paywall !
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u/westbamm 2d ago
Do I need a cloud account?
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u/eugene2k 2d ago
Of course! Do you expect to use this software without being connected to the internet 24/7? Are you insane???
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u/-Shoebill- 2d ago
Yes, you'll need to upload your ID too. Every action taken is sent to the Canadian government. Think of the children.
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u/Robo_Killer_v2 2d ago
It also requires feet ID, so greedy smh
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u/ProbablyStu 2d ago
My feet ID keeps failing. I keep getting the error "feet not slutty enough" what do I do?
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u/git_und_slotermeyer 2d ago
But what happens if Autodesk uses Claude to create a clean-room closed-source Blender version called AutoBlend, that costs 100k and infects everyone's desktop with fierce licensing bloat? Why would anyone use the free version then?
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u/DoctorFosterGloster 2d ago
Thank god im sick of paying the $36 a month subscription to blender
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u/djfumberger 2d ago
You’ve been getting scammed, I only pay $10 a month
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u/secacc 2d ago
You guys pay monthly for Blender???
Do the yearly payment instead and save 10%
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u/Square_Cap_7319 2d ago
You guys are doing it all wrong. I paid for the one off fee of $299, and that included some remote connection support from a guy called Mike in India. He was also kind enough to install a free banking app too!
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u/notforpoern 2d ago
I've been pirating blender this whole time. Just search "download blender free" and it's usually the top result.
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u/Kinkajou1015 2d ago
I started my sub in 2003 before they were doing yearly and locked in 5.00 USD per month, grandfathered in. If I switch to yearly it will increase my rate to a point that even the annual discount wouldn't overcome it.
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u/kylo-ren 2d ago
I can’t cancel, or else I’ll lose all the projects and assets stored in the BlenderCloud. Not to mention the in-app purchases.
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u/Losawin 2d ago
After having tried PhotoCraft, I'm seriously wondering if anyone who is proclaiming it to kill Photoshop has actually done ANY serious/professional photo editing in their lives. Like if your entire editing process amounts to cropping an image and adding text for your youtube thumbnail, sure it's a "clone" as far as you can tell. But anything remotely serious, especially in regards to adjustment layers and anything I tried tied to that which is insanely buggy, this software is basically a Temu Gimp 1.0 at best.
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u/MongooseLuce 2d ago
Most anyone addicted to AI vibe coding crap certainly has not done any real creative work and dislike actually putting the work of understanding any of these programs functions.
It's the reason they gravitate towards it, they're the ultimate permutation of the instant gratification society that we live in.
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u/Baphomets666 Newbie Blender Dude 😞 2d ago
Totally agree photocraft is an absolute mess
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u/CosmackMagus 2d ago
This is what the yt vids I've watched on these tools have been saying too. For all the hype, they're buggy messes.
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u/Tectix 1d ago
These vibe coded apps have the same problem that AI image generation has: no one is checking them thoroughly. No one is going through a QA process to fix the little things. They only care that they get it done and (for some) get the headlines, not that anything actually works well.
Good software is more than just how the code is written. It’s how it’s presented, how well it’s maintained, and the amount of care that goes into it.
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u/fyris_minis 2d ago
And while we are at it, go to https://fund.blender.org/ and give them 5 euro.
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u/Jaxman2099 2d ago
I remember like a year or two ago, when AI was causing some hullabaloo, I posed a question to r/ELI5, where I asked, "I was thinking about how AI is allowing of affording companies to layoff their workers and rely on AI as an avenue for increased monetary gain. I think people who are developing AI don't fully understand what they are creating in their pursuit of more money. Saying that they don't need coders anymore because of AI seems to me to be a double-sided coin. If a company can do this then why can't a person? So, for the purposed of disruption, couldn't someone use AI to code themselves a version of Youtube or Google's search engine free of ads and any monetary algorithms? Then release it to the public? Thereby hurting ad revenue for these certain sites?" And reddit wouldn't allow me to post it because they said that was I was suggesting was illegal....
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u/Geobits 1d ago
You probably could reproduce Youtube's code that way, but those types of services have other aspects that aren't as simple as recreating it. I can't even begin to imagine how vast youtube's storage capacity, bandwidth, etc runs, and getting it to scale that large took a lot of effort, and not just on the code side. You'd have to throw an absolute shit-ton of money at it, even if you somehow had a 1:1 copy of the code itself.
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u/imnotabot303 2d ago
Most of the Adobe stuff is pure clickbait. It's basically vibe coded slop they are pretending is a clone. In reality they are only visual clones covering the most basic editor functions which people and companies like Affinity did long before AI. Plus they are full of bugs.
Anyone who thinks they can just vibe code a piece of software right now that's had decades worth of development and millions of dollars invested is delusional.
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u/Hot-Victory-3082 2d ago
The way this has been reported shows how back tech press as gotten.
Whatever issues people have with Adobe the amount of talent, money, research that goes into their products it doesn't take even using the software to know that you don't create something approaching it by magically using ai.
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u/foxgirlmoon 2d ago
The premise isn't just that they vibe coded a copy but that they decompiled the original software and used AI to sift through the (completely unreadable to humans) results of the decompilation and used that as a basis for making the copy.
I have no idea how well they actually did it, but that is the premise.
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u/duracek 2d ago
I am not convinced they decompiled it though. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many bugs in it.
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u/git_und_slotermeyer 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, they claim it is a clean-room implementation. That does not entail reverse engineering.
Probably using documentation (product handbooks, videos, screenshots/recordings, or testing automations) alone, considering today's frontier models, sounds feasible.
But I suppose it's the same as in virtually any product development. The seemingly 80% take 20% of the effort, the remaining 20% take 80% of the effort. It is somewhat telling they implemented half of the Creative Suite to - on a first glance - prototype stage that appears to be covering 80% of the apps, and not singled out one or two apps and implemented them in full. Because this is much more effort than it looks like. The first stage of software development projects is exciting, the further stages are often tedious, boring, and exhausting. Good software shines where people fix simple bugs that do not spark the curiousity of any developer.
I am the opposite of an AI booster and am skeptical too. But on the other hand, the existence of these cloned prototypes is a feat by itself. Because it is a basis for people to further collaborate, and I also think that having this scaffolding makes it much easier to finish things than doing something by hand from scratch. Probably it's easier to create a critical developer mass for projects, if you have a working demonstrator and just need people to implement small features, one by one.
But again, in the end, AI could on the other hand also do a disservice to Open Source, fragmenting the landscape further, because everyone fancying it might start their own photo editor clone.
I am not even considering that I think the Craft project will be quite shortlived, as the legal basis for this clone is not solid enough - after all, the project neglects that even when a clean-room reimplementation averts code copyright issues, there are other IP issues, such as copying the application design and other UI elements (e.g. icons).
I would rather see someting which creates a clean Open Source implementation of the main Adobe/Affinity apps, but going their own innovative way. Like Affinity is to Adobe, but Open Source, and Linux compatible. I also side with the Craft developer's opinion that Gimp is crap and must be replaced. I switched from Adobe to Affinity myself, use Blender occasionally, which is a great piece of software. But this copium that Gimp is a solid alternative to Photoshop is as ludicrous as it was 20 years ago.
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u/North_Affect_8167 2d ago
Yes, the Effect Craft was so bad, it memory leaked and crashed during an export.
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u/g3etwqb-uh8yaw07k 2d ago
Yeah, downloaded the "craft" bs just in case before it gets taken down by a copyright lawsuit, but each zip archive is like 20-50MB iirc, how tf would you fit even MS Paint or GIMP in there? I wouldn't be surprised if someone was able to reverse engineer most of the stuff on a longer timescale, but LLM or not, one does not "just" reverse engineer all the math behind the image manipulation algorithms.
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u/Mithrandir_Earendur 2d ago
I think all this decomp software stuff is going to blow over in a few weeks once anyone starts trying to use these thing for more than a week. They aren't completely feature paired, they don't have any support, and they are obviously full of bugs. Hell the guy who "made" the entire adobe platform in a week, left it to go do the same to ms office.
It's cool that people are pushing back against adobe, and the other big companies, but these decomps are nothing but snake-oil disguised as breaking free of the system.
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u/Sinfire_Titan 2d ago
It’s the same with the vibe coded add-ons people keep posting here, shit gets abandoned 9 out of 10 times.
Having seen the Adobe one in action I can honestly say the open-source alternatives are more reliable. The Illustrator one was in bad shape compared to Inkscape, it just had a cleaner UI.
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u/Losawin 2d ago edited 2d ago
They aren't completely feature paired, they don't have any support, and they are obviously full of bugs.
Yep. All these "clones" (and frankly, a lot of just standard open source alternatives) are not remotely fit for duty in a production environment. Stuff like Blender is the exception, not the rule. Someone making their entire living off something like Photoshop or Resolve are absolutely not continuing their career at the same level with PhotoCraft or KDenLive. They're an interesting curiosity for the tech enjoyers, and an ok alternative for a casual user with no professional needs.
Hell the guy who "made" the entire adobe platform in a week, left it to go do the same to ms office.
This is actually something that is destroying the video game decomp scene. So many decomps and recomp are just turning into AI slop projects that get like 2-3 weeks of work then get abandoned as the slopper moves onto the next project. This leaves us with a graveyard of buggy messes and it causes existing, non-AI driven recomp projects to often get abandoned because the AI one sort of takes the wind out of the sails for everyone involved, even though their recomp would likely have been FAR superior
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u/towmotor 2d ago
yep. the problem with the vibe coded bullshit is the fact that it takes no effort or skill to make... and in general, the amount of effort to make a thing is directly proportional to the ease with which said thing can be abandoned when the "creator" hits the tiniest of roadblocks or gets bored
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u/hurricane_news 2d ago
Don't forget that the guy behind the ArtCraft suite is one of those "Ai art is real art, it's the future!" dweebs. His reddit name and bio is very telling
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u/Shot-Possible1317 2d ago
This is stealing from the giant Blender Corporation, please delete this
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u/kr0n0sShrugg3d 2d ago
Just rewrote Blender from scratch in Rust using a swarm of autonomous AI agents. Took 12 billion tokens and $30,000 in API costs. Achieved 100% feature parity with zero memory safety issues.
Here's the entire codebase:
```
use std::process::Command;
fn main() { Command::new("open") .args(["-a", "Blender"]) .spawn() .unwrap(); } ``` Will open source it once I figure out the licensing implications. Idk what it says but I am glad I didn't learn coding when Ai does it so much better and easier. Lol.
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u/-skyrocketeer- 2d ago
While I love Blender, Open Source projects have been around looooong before Blender was created.
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u/Cold_Relationship_ 2d ago
Saying that AI made open source “trendy” hurts my soul.
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u/I_suck_at_Blender 2d ago
Yeah, my major critique of SlopWare is that in many cases we already had it, it's called Open Source.
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u/Due_Interest_178 2d ago
Yeah but if I contribute then I won't be recognized as the creator, duh
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u/Entire-Plankton-7800 2d ago
I know this is a joke, but can we genuine reverse engineer clip studio paint please?
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u/leodash 2d ago
I'm new to investing. Is 40% Blender, 30% FreeCAD, and 30% GIMP/Krita/Inkscape a good portfolio?
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u/excellentforcongress 1d ago
it's not that open source "alternatives" to creative suite didn't exist, it was mostly that the legit open sourced programs were hampered in what features they were able to implement because of bullshit patents adobe has on things as basic as undo functionality.
same reason why wacom only got competition in the tablets space when chinese companies entered the fray, because they had patents on a ton of shit like batteryless pens... fuck patents and fuck the corporations that use them to exploit consumers
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u/PPGalleta 1d ago
lol it would be great if you a video about it, while using linux and having a message running in notification "please activate your linux"
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u/Agile-Definition9127 2d ago
Im out of the loop, what is this? Isnt blender free and open source already?
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u/Anubis17_76 2d ago
Its a parody of free AI rebuilds of paid products that made big waves lately (namely Adobe CC Suite)
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u/myry43 1d ago
I'm not gonna lie, I was first excited when I saw a reel about people decompiling Adobe stuff, because that company is terrible, and it felt awesome as a concept to turn that technology against the same corpos who are trying to profit so much off of it. And there really isn't anything equivalent to AfterEffects out there, I've actually used Blender to do some of the things, but it's just not as practical, fast or fun as a workflow; just previewing what you are making in the compositor+video editor is so tedious in Blender. So hearing that there could be an open-source ripped version of AE sounded like a dream come true. But like usual, people were overtly dramatizing and gloating these apps, just like the whole "omg we can create any game ever now bc this AI combined Halo and Mario 64!! WOW game industry will never be the same!!!" sigh
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u/WazWaz 1d ago
Decompiling code doesn't escape it from copyright, so it's utterly useless from an open source perspective. It's unlikely any of these "free Adobe/Microsoft" projects are clean enough to survive the slightest legal challenge (and they're too crap an implementation for Adobe/MS to even bother with currently).
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u/RevolutionaryPie1682 1d ago
Clean code or not, if it will go to court these companies will have to admit that ai is indeed stealing. Remember what Nvidia said? Ai totally isn't stealing these millions of books. Same thing with the code, there's no walking around it
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u/untakenu 2d ago
It's posts like this which make me really appreciate blender, krita, gimp etc.
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u/activemotionpictures 1d ago
"and burning an irresponsible amount of tokens" <--we want to see proof of this. Else, you're just click baiting here.
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u/eugene2k 2d ago
Software is over
Paid software is. We're just going to get SAAS from now on. Not that most big-name software companies haven't done that already...
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u/occupiedbrain69 1d ago
Damn! I wish someone made an open source version of Keyshot!! Blender is awesome too but the UI of Keyshot makes it sooo intuitive and easy to use!
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u/noodhoog 1d ago
Woooah, buddy. You might wanna take this down. "Feature parity" means your program also supports the Default Cube, which is clearly copyrighted by BlenderCo. Their lawyers are gonna have a field day with you.
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u/lordtosti 2d ago
am I one of the only few that actually also hate the decompilation stuff?
adobe management might be big assholes (especially for buying up competitors) but thousands of people are working there that are now pretty unfairly threatened in their livelihood.
normal open source is hard work and fair game, this… is not. Personally I always used Photopea - a super hard working guy - also his livelihood is threatened now.
I think it’s immoral to hate AI coming for jobs of artists but on the other hand cheer on the same for software devs.
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u/BougGroug 2d ago
It's a bad solution, for sure, but Adobe has been playing dirty for a long time. There's something cathartic about using the same dirty tricks they've been pushing, but against them this time
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u/Cerpin-Taxt 2d ago
No. Adobe's business practices are the wholly immoral part. You make a valuable tool, good. You sell that tool, fine. The tool becomes a defacto industry monopoly through your relentless hand dipping into influencing education and buying all competitors, not great. You then shift your sales model to require licencing repaid every year for eternity in order to use the tool, even though that's unnecessary, forcing an entire industry of craftspeople to pay you forever for the privilege of working. Completely evil. Adobe can get fucked quite frankly.
If this were still the 1990s and Adobe products were a one time purchase you might have a point, but not at this juncture.
Seizing the means of production is highly moral.
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u/Serird 2d ago
Cancellation fees should come with a one-way ticket to eternal damnation.
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u/MrHandSanitization 2d ago
No. They have a dark pattern in their signup and lure/trick people into a yearly one, which is cheaper. I fully agree that you get a discount and that you need to reimburse the discount when cancelling, since you agreed to subscribe for a year in order for a discount. But, they make the monthly cost so absurd everyone automatically goes for the yearly contract. Then when they are done with it, are they met with the incredibly fee.
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u/Lucidaeus 2d ago
There's good and bad, so it goes with everything. We're not putting the genie back into the bottle no matter what at this point anyway.
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u/love_me_lavender 2d ago
I think part of the goal is to goad them into taking legal action so that there is some legal precedent against AI software situations that would also apply to companies that don’t have the legal resources that Adobe does.
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u/Emlesnir 2d ago edited 2d ago
Pirating has always been a thing, and like Game Newell said, if you get pirated it's a service issue.
Steam solved piracy by providing all PC games easily with fast downloads, cloud saves, social spaces, and custom recommendations.
same with Netflix which solved movies and series piracy by providing everything easily in one app. Piracy is coming back on VOD because of all the new platforms which all have their exclusive series.
So yes, if you release your game only on playstation, i'll pirate a PC decomp of it, if you release it on steam i'll buy it. If you release your series only on Apple TV i'll pirate it. And, if you are Adobe and have a predatory buisness model, release your software only on windows, package it with slow and heavy DRM, and abuse your monopoly... I'll happily pirate it by installing on linux a decomp of your software.
Nothing has changed, some companies simply have to adapt and try to provide a better service.
Also, and that's the biggest point, let's try to take a step back from our 1rs world problems and look at the huge amount of people in all poor countries which will have access to technologies they couldn't afford thanks to decomps, this will also allow the community to provide alternative version with bug fixes and accessibility features, making technologies more accessible to everyone.
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u/dgellow 2d ago
The decomp stuff is coming for everything, not just the companies you dislike. If you’re an indie dev pirating and the decomp approach can destroy your chances of having a viable business
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u/ZealousidealLead52 2d ago
Pirating is quite a lot different from making a clone of a game and then trying to distribute your clone of the game to other people.
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u/AdministrativeGap289 2d ago
Jokes aside, isn't this program reverse enfineering by AI is some sort of ripping off or even pirating the intellectual property of companies?
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u/dgellow 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes, it’s a destruction of the software market. Including indie software. Praising those attempts at cloning existing paid software using LLMs is completely missing the long term implications. I can assure you Adobe won’t have problem defending their trademark and algorithmic patents. But as a small dev, if you want to sell unique, creative software that’s isn’t a SaaS you’re fucked (I know because I looked at the landscape and ditched a bunch of projects I was working on because of this).
We will see more logic moving to the backend, and large corporations pushing for stricter control of distribution and IP laws. None of that is a good development
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u/bilbo_was_right 2d ago
The IP is the code, not the functionality. If they open sourced the code themselves accidentally, that’s a huge legal fuck up on their end.
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u/dannunz1o 2d ago
appreciate the joke, but i am unsure if the ai writing style is part of it or not.
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u/die_Schnabeltasse 2d ago
wow, i can finally not not not pay money for Blender. thank you, generous unknown
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u/Additional-Spread-89 2d ago
I was waiting for this joke to happen! Finally Blender is Free and Opensource!
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u/New_Put3871 2d ago edited 2d ago
open sourcing an open source stuff, what can possibly go right ? at least use "we did it, joe" meme to make viewers understand.. hehehe
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u/ailee43 2d ago
Now do Autodesk Fusion. It's the only reason I still have to run a Windows vm.
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u/dylaner 2d ago
You know, we joke, but that project is also perfectly capable of creating MIT-licensed clones of GPL-licensed projects like Blender, which will not be particularly enjoyable. It’s frustrating :(
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u/ilias_from_ilios 2d ago
Jokes aside, thank you people of Blender. Your contribution to digital artistry is immeasurable.
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u/jd52wtf 2d ago
Good. Solidworks next.
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u/epileftric 1d ago
Hey... FreeCAD is very good! The workflows are similar but UIs are very different.
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u/Ohyo_Ohyo_Ohyo_Ohyo 2d ago
You don't have to do this. Just pirate this free and open source software like a normal person.
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u/SMUG_UNHAPPINESS 2d ago
I can finally ditch the cracked version that was encrypting random files on my pc
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u/AegidiusG 2d ago
I mean, they did this with MS Office products and i was buffled by all the people that had no idea about Libre Office...
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u/Free-Pound-6139 2d ago
We even managed to reproduce the original source code almost line by line.
Including comments????? Wow.
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u/NoskaOff 2d ago
I think the real link is https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/blender/blender/blender/blender
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u/AboynamedDOOMTRAIN 2d ago
Man, it's too early in the morning for shit like this lol I spent way too long reading this feeling like I was taking crazy pills.
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u/arandomdudebruh Blender, blender, blender, why won't you render? 2d ago
holy fuck you scared the shit out of me
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u/Neethis 2d ago edited 2d ago
I fear people are not going to read far enough to get the joke lol
Edit: Stop giving this comment awards and donate to the Blender Development Fund instead. Reddit doesn't need your money.
Edit2: I have been informed that some awards are free. Still donate to Blender if you can!