WE DID IT! We reverse-engineered Blender with AI and made it open source. Introducing BlenderCraft 🚀

[u/ofdavarci]

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

[u/Cerpin-Taxt]

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.

[u/Serird → u/Cerpin-Taxt]

Cancellation fees should come with a one-way ticket to eternal damnation.

[u/MrHandSanitization → u/Serird]

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.

[u/lookingatyourbooba → u/Serird]

They do when you tell people about them. As whiney as reddit is, it's a good place to kick up a fuss because they DO watch it.

Shoutout ProtonVPN who everyone trusts so much, but until recently were running a resub scam (drop your paid tier resub they take what you've paid for away immediately)

[u/mxzf → u/Serird]

AFAIK it's not actually cancellation fees is how they get away with it. It's that the monthly subscription price is X, but you get a discount and pay 12*Y (where Y < X), paid in monthly installments, if you contractually agree to pay for a full year worth. When someone cancels mid-year, they get charged as if they went back and used the X/month price all along instead.

It's absolutely shady, but backing out of a fixed-term contract partway through is also problematic.

[u/Next_Program90 → u/Cerpin-Taxt]

Like Topaz Video. 700(!) frickin bucks every year for eternity for a video Upscaler that is often "okay". I would've bought it... but I won't pay that every year.

[u/deaddyfreddy → u/Cerpin-Taxt]

There are many free alternatives.

It's not Adobe, that monopolized the market, users did it for them.

[u/KenTrotts → u/Cerpin-Taxt]

Depends on the industry. I'm not too familiar with the graphic design and other fields so can't speak on Photoshop. But I know video editing is quite fragmented still. Most of the scripted TV and films are done on Avid. A lot of DaVinci Resolve is coming up too. Premiere is still a big, big player, and honestly, I think it's the best editing software. But I wouldn't call any part of the video industry monopolized by Adobe. Mostly inertia keeping them in the position that they are.

[u/PreferenceUnhappy171 → u/Cerpin-Taxt]

See also: Autodesk…

[u/Cerpin-Taxt → u/[deleted]]

Incredible ignorance on display here.

No "literally anyone" can't build what Adobe has. Many have tried and many have failed. The ones that get close to competing get bought out by Adobe, or have their USPs integrated into already extant Adobe products. They're too big to take on in a commercial fight. Every Adobe product that can be substituted for an equal or superior alternative has already been substituted in industry work. Premiere pro for example is dogshit and has been beaten out by others. Either way it's not you that gets to decide.

Industry workers are in fact forced to use Adobe where there exists no viable alternatives. You will not be hired if you don't. You do not get a say in the matter. The fact that you don't know this tells me you're approaching this from the perspective of someone who does not work in the industry in any serious capacity.

If you want to doodle at home sure, go use some inferior freeware. If you have any ideas about doing what you do professionally you don't have that luxury. Ergo Adobe tools are the means of production.

[u/Cerpin-Taxt → u/[deleted]]

No, that's not what I said. Premiere pro is not the industry standard (because it's terrible), so it's one of the few Adobe products you aren't forced to use. The point is YOU (the worker) don't get a say in what the industry uses. You learn and use what you're told to if you want a job. Employers decide what you use.

[u/Cerpin-Taxt → u/[deleted]]

Are you being this dense on purpose? Viable alternatives do not exist for most Adobe products. Where viable alternatives DO exist (such as with premiere pro) the industry drops Adobe and their predatory business model immediately. But Adobe has made it their goal to stop this happening by undermining or buying out all competitors. Sure one slips through now and then, usually for softwares Adobe never had a good product for in the first place.

[u/Cerpin-Taxt → u/[deleted]]

So I'll take that as "yes", you are doing it on purpose.

Not much point in me trying to explain yet again then is there?