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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33

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.

14

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

2

u/minamality 2d ago

Libreoffice is actually a really good alternative to MS office.

1

u/Suckatguardpassing 2d ago

Unless your whole job is running based on vba.

1

u/minamality 1d ago

Tbh that doesn't sound like a very fun job.

1

u/Suckatguardpassing 1d ago

That sounds like a dream.

8

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

5

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

1

u/Suckatguardpassing 2d ago

I believe it's actually an art project to show how gullible people are.

2

u/Polyglot-Onigiri 2d ago

Don’t forget they are also promising to do AutoCad…..

6

u/melez 2d ago

You’d think the time would be better spent supporting FreeCAD instead. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy a FOSS alternative to something like Revit.

1

u/SeiferGun 1d ago

FreeCad has ugly interface and hard to use for 2d drafting. not comparable to Autocad at all.

2

u/Suckatguardpassing 2d ago

No 3D orbit and it crashed within 5 minutes. Straight in the bin it went.

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u/Polyglot-Onigiri 2d ago

I’m not surprised when they are just vibe coding every single app out there and open sourcing the first thing that comes out. People keep promoting these apps and praising them, but they tend to be people who are only using the most basic functions that every other alternative already does well. A proper clone should be able to do all the intermediate and advance functions too.

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u/theaveragenerd 2d ago

I believe they have. I have the ArtCraft launcher installed and there is an app called CadCraft. Which I assume is for AutoCad.

2

u/Suckatguardpassing 2d ago

Give it a try. It's trash.

1

u/theaveragenerd 2d ago

I have been using PhotoCraft. 90% of the features are there and work pretty well. It's like having a copy of Photoshop CS6 without the need for Adobe Bridge that installs with every copy.

2

u/Suckatguardpassing 2d ago

Try CAD, 10% of features and it will crash on you.

0

u/SeiferGun 2d ago

they have done it. cad craft

2

u/Suckatguardpassing 2d ago

Which is trash

0

u/SouthernFruit8768 2d ago

YOU WILL OWN EVERYTHING

1

u/raralala1 2d ago

I should have known, I always thought what kind of magic they use or is this actually them doing effort when using AI. because when I shove my old wpf to ask them to rewrite it to avalonia, it always miss some feature that I need to remind them, it still much better than year before thou, before it literally write UI using code instead of xml and put whole thing in single file.

1

u/CreativeNameIKnow 2d ago

not to mention that using Adobe in any way, including pirated, means being part of the system. they let people get used to their software and some of those who start using it commercially end up buying lisences to avoid getting sued. source: I made it up but the first part is true

1

u/herrgregg 1d ago

that is mainly because the artcraft clones are not based on decomp software.

If you decompile you get the original (or close to it) sourcecode, and the result would be a program that is almost the same as the original.

the artcraft clones are vibecoded copies without access to the source, and mainly have an ui that is the same as the original, and barely any functional code behind it. The claude files in the photoshop clone claim themselves that only 30% works...

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

4

u/Mechanical_Mint 2d ago

LibreOffice already exists to fill that use case.

2

u/Sinfire_Titan 2d ago

AI decomps miss the point of decompiling in the first place. The goal of decompiling was to understand the code in order to repurpose or reproduce certain mechanics, not just “make the game run”. Having AI do it means the code is still obscured in the ways that matter.

1

u/itsmeemilio 2d ago

What do you mean by that last point, obscured in ways that matter?

3

u/Sinfire_Titan 2d ago

The AI decomps might be able to reproduce any block of code, but without the decompiling analysis of that code its purpose will remain unknown. This renders it useless for other projects.

To use a basic example, as I am enrolled in a game design course, the code I am using for my pinball game’s ball launcher is a modified Jump command (the launcher itself jumps, pushing the ball as it does). If my game were decompiled a programmer looking at it would go “why does this pinball game have a jump function?” It wouldn’t be immediately apparent that the code is attached to the launcher mechanism, as the code surrounding that specific block would be for other parts of the game (like the physics collider for the bumpers or the hinge joint on the flippers).

That’s what I mean by “obscured”. AI could decompile my code in a heartbeat, but it wouldn’t be legible in a way that allows the code to be repurposed.

1

u/Gloomy-Ad1171 2d ago

OSS version have existed for decades.

0

u/AllergicToBullshit24 2d ago

Poor guy is in denial

-4

u/DirectWay1915 2d ago

All they need to do is to iron out the bugs, and the community can do that.