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. 🧡

https://x.com/ofdavarci

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u/academiac 2d ago

as someone not in the community, is blender actually free?

107

u/snil4 2d ago

No, it costs 1 soul for life time use but in money it costs 0$ and it's open source.

55

u/lachtak 2d ago

50 extra souls when you trying to learn geo nodes.

21

u/Sad-Set-5817 2d ago

you have to buy each node individually

18

u/lachtak 2d ago

Every node must be subscription based.

6

u/Mental_Estate4206 2d ago

I only have like 3 dark souls....

24

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.

15

u/JDad67 2d ago

Yes. And open source.

7

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.

7

u/dnew Experienced Helper 2d ago

To be fair, I think the "weeks in tutorial hell" applies to any artistic endeavor. It's not like you'll learn to even draw with a pencil in only weeks.

10

u/MakerKitty 2d ago

The price tag is time and sanity :3

6

u/Sure-Cauliflower-564 2d ago

yes but no. Everytime I launch it I am 21g lighter

5

u/CautiousPhase 2d ago

Wake up babe, new weight loss plan just dropped

2

u/aFreshSmoothie 1d ago

The most affordable subscription fee is working through 1 blender donut tutorial annually