Blender
Add Node → Connectors → Blender
This node doesn’t ask a model for anything. It talks to the copy of Blender running on your machine, 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. 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’s the only node with no inputs at all. The scene is the setup, and the scene lives in Blender.
What’s on the node
| Area | What goes in it |
|---|---|
| The scene panel | What’s open in Blender right now: the file and its version, the scene, the active camera, the frame range and frame rate, the output size, and how many objects are in there. Read from Blender, not typed here. |
| Refresh | Reads the scene again. The panel polls on its own every few seconds, so this is really for the moment straight after you start the add-on’s server. |
| The line underneath | Says what stands between you and a clip — Blender not found, the server not started, no camera in the scene — or, when nothing does, what you’re about to get. |
| Frames · Size · Aspect · Look | The whole of the render. See the settings below. |
| Clip | What the next render will be: how many frames, how many seconds, at what pixel size. It updates as you change the settings. |
| Render | Fires the render. It’s greyed out until there’s a scene with a camera in it. Underneath, Free · local — this one costs nothing and goes nowhere. |
| V | The one handle on the node, on the right: the finished clip. There is no left side. |
Connecting it to Blender
Three things have to be true, and the line under the scene panel tells you which one isn’t.
Blender has to be installed where the app looks — the Applications folder on macOS, the Blender Foundation folder under Program Files on Windows.
Blender has to be open, with your scene in it. The node 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 machine, and that’s the only door the app knocks on.
Get all three right and the dot next to the file name turns green. From then on the panel keeps itself current: save the file, switch scene, move the frame range in Blender, and the node notices within a few seconds without being asked.
One thing it will refuse: a scene with no active camera. There’s nothing to render from, so the Render button stays off until you add one and set it as the scene camera. A camera that’s there but not animated is fine — the node says so, and the clip simply holds one view.
The settings
Frames starts as the scene’s own range, and you can narrow it to the stretch you actually want. Type your own numbers and a small Scene button appears next to them to hand the range back to Blender. 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.
Aspect is the shape of the clip. Scene — the default — follows whatever Blender is set to output, and its glyph shows you what that is. Pick any other ratio 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, headless Blender. Your file keeps its path and its unsaved state, and the window you’re working in never freezes. The frames come out as stills, and the app’s own encoder turns them into an MP4 at the scene’s frame rate.
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, and the card shows the render’s progress while it works.
One render at a time. Fire a second and it waits its turn, rather than the two of them fighting over the same machine.
The clip lands in the card like any other result, with the strip underneath for the ones before it. Render Settings on a finished clip shows the scene and the settings that made it — including which file and which camera — so a render you liked is one you can repeat. It costs nothing, so nothing lands in your cost tracking.
Handing it to a video model
Wire the node’s output into the V handle of a Video node, and the model works from your render instead of guessing.
Most of the models that take a video restyle it: your motion and your framing stay, the look changes. Seedance 2.5, Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 and Gemini Omni all do that. 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.