Blender
Add Node → Connectors → Blender
This card doesn’t ask a model for anything. It talks to the copy of Blender running on your Mac, reads whatever scene you have open, and renders it here — flat-shaded, in seconds, for nothing.
What comes out isn’t meant to be looked at. It’s meant to be wired into a video model, as a reference for the camera move and the layout. Blocking, camera move and timing are decided in Blender, where you can actually control them; the model is left to supply the look. That’s a far shorter road than describing a camera move in words and generating until one lands.
It has no inputs: the scene is the setup, and the scene lives in Blender.
What’s on the card
| Area | What it does |
|---|---|
| Above the card | The card’s name, then its buttons: help, favourite, Save As, Preview and delete. |
| The scene | Render new clip, then the file, the scene, its camera and its frames once Blender has been read. Until then it reads The scene open in Blender, rendered on this Mac. |
| The foot | The render settings — frames, size, shape and look — and Render. |
| Output | The ring on the right: the clip. There’s no left side. |
In the Prompt bar
Select the card and the Prompt bar opens on it, with the scene open in Blender where the prompt would be, and the render settings in the row underneath.
The scene panel shows what’s open in Blender right now — the file, the scene, the camera and whether it’s animated, the frame range and frame rate, the size of the clip it will make, and the objects, unsaved edits included. It’s read from Blender, not typed here, and it refreshes on its own every few seconds while the bar is open on the card. Refresh reads it again at once, which is really for the moment straight after you start the add-on’s server.
Render sits at the end of the row, with Local under it: it runs on this Mac and costs nothing. It’s greyed out until there’s a scene with a camera in it.
Connecting it to Blender
Three things have to be true, and the bar tells you which one isn’t.
Blender has to be installed where the app looks — the Applications folder, in your Mac’s or your own, or Homebrew’s.
Blender has to be open, with your scene in it. The card reads the live session, not a .blend file on disk, so there’s nothing to pick and nothing to import.
The MCP add-on’s server has to be running — the same add-on Claude’s Blender connector uses. Install it in Blender, then start its server from Preferences › Add-ons › MCP (or switch on its autostart and forget about it). It listens on port 9876 on your own Mac, and that’s the only door the app knocks on.
Get all three right and the dot next to the file name turns green; until then it’s red, and the panel says what to do. From then on it keeps itself current: save the file, switch scene, move the frame range in Blender, and the card notices within a few seconds.
One thing it will refuse: a scene with no active camera. There’s nothing to render from, so Render stays off until you add one and set it as the scene camera. A camera that’s there but not animated is fine — the clip simply holds one view.
The settings
Frames start as the scene’s own range — leave the start and end empty to keep it — and you can narrow them to the stretch you actually want. Type your own numbers and a small arrow appears next to them to hand the range back to the scene’s. A render tops out at 1,800 frames, which is longer than any video model will take anyway.
Size is 720p or 1080p, and it names the short side. A vertical clip is 720 pixels wide rather than being squeezed into a landscape frame.
Shape is the shape of the clip. Scene’s shape — the default — follows whatever Blender is set to output. Pick any of the other shapes and the shot is genuinely re-framed: it’s what you’d get by changing the output size in Blender itself, so the lens is untouched and the camera simply takes in more or less of the scene. That’s the control to reach for when the model wants a vertical clip and your scene is 16:9.
Look is how the render is shaded. All three are Workbench passes with studio light, object outlines and shadows — no lamps, no samples, nothing to wait for.
| Look | What you get |
|---|---|
| Flat colours | Every object in its material’s viewport colour. The default, and the one that separates things without pretending to be a lit render. |
| Grey clay | The whole scene in one grey, with cavity shading picking out the creases. The one for reading form and volume. |
| Random colours | A different colour per object. Useful when the model needs to tell one thing from another and your materials are all much the same. |
What happens when you press Render
The app asks Blender to save a copy of what’s open — unsaved edits included — and renders that copy in a second Blender, in the background. Your file keeps its path and its unsaved state, and the window you’re working in stays free to use. The frames come out as stills, and the app turns them into an MP4 at the scene’s frame rate. The card shows how far it’s got, frame by frame, and Cancel stops it.
It’s quick. A hundred and twenty frames at 720p land in a few seconds, because there’s nothing to light and nothing to sample. Long ranges at 1080p on a heavy scene take longer.
One render at a time. Fire a second and it waits its turn, rather than the two of them fighting over the same Mac.
The clip lands on the card like any other result, with the strip underneath for the ones before it. It costs nothing, so nothing is added to the project’s running total.
Handing it to a video model
Wire the card’s output into the V ring of a Video card, and the model works from your render instead of guessing. The ring is there on the models that take a clip: Seedance 2.5, Seedance 2.0, Kling O3, Gemini Omni and FLUX 3, and on Runware Kling V3 and Veo 3.1 too.
Most of the models that take a video restyle it: your motion and your framing stay, the look changes. FLUX 3 is the exception — it continues a clip from where it ends, which is a different job.
Write the prompt for the look you want, not for the camera. The camera is already in the picture, and that’s the whole reason for rendering it here first.
Nothing stops you using the clip anywhere else a video goes. It’s an ordinary video output — see How nodes connect.