HPR4755: Blender

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. Blender - https://www.blender.org/ Python - https://www.python.org/ Anthropic Claude - https://claude.ai Linden Lab SecondLife - https://secondlife.com/ Go Language - https://go.dev/ Apologies for squirrels and silliness, no mystical middle-earth beings were harmed in the making of this episode Provide feedback on this episode .

October 23, 2026Duration unavailable

In brief

Episode summary

Lee and Elzabeth walk through Coombe Woods near Croydon, discussing their experiences with Blender, Python scripting, and Second Life development. They explore how AI tools like Claude assist in creating original 3D meshes and functional virtual items, while sharing anecdotes about their outdoor surroundings and past digital projects.

Takeaway 1Blender utilizes Python for advanced scripting, allowing creators to go beyond the standard user interface to build complex objects.

Claude can assist in the Blender workflow by helping to write and refine code for 3D modeling based on specific iterative prompts.

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Adapted from “HPR4755: Blender” by Hacker Public Radio, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

This transcript was generated by speech recognition and the summary and chapters by AI, so they can contain errors. BestPodcast is not affiliated with the creator. These adaptations are available under the same license.

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4755 for Friday the 23rd of October 2026. Today's show is entitled Blender. It is the 10th show of Elzabeth and is about 32 minutes long. It carries an explicit flag. The summary is Elzabeth and Lee walk in the woods and talk about Blender.

Hello, my name's Lee and I'm here with Elzabeth. We are in Coombe Woods, which is a place just east of Croydon. We managed to drive here in a 2007 Prius. You make that sound like that drive was challenging. There was nothing challenging about it. Still learning how to drive on the on UK roads. Yeah. Yeah. Look at all the pine cones. Yeah, this is this is September, but this these trees are dropping pine cones all over. We are. Yeah, like the one the one we recorded with Ken the giant red mysterious badger.

About the giant red mysterious badger with sharp teeth. Fangs. Cuz Thro naturally pointed out that the fact that we were trying to think of something to say with Ken came across a bit like random, although we got good comments on that one. But yeah. I was super nervous during that one. Yeah. Cuz that was still one of my first Well, you were a bit quiet in the back. We were recording on the phone and you didn't have a like a mic in the back. Well, plus you two already had met each other and I usually do better once I you know meet someone and feel a little more comfortable but Ken's pretty easy to talk to.

Oh, look how cute. This is a log seat and they flattened the top of it. So, it actually you it's not uncomfortable. Once upon a time in Hollywood. Now, where do you fit on the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon? You mean who do I know that might know? Probably my sister cuz she's makeup artist. Probably people she's met. My connection to Kevin Bacon is Footloose in Oklahoma Footloose. Right. Yeah. He was the one that started in Footloose and that was a story that came from that general area of the country and Yeah.

So, it impacted a lot of people. Yeah. Now, to be honest, I probably have other degrees of Kevin Bacon that I'm not familiar with. Is Footloose anything like Fame? Is it the same genre? Cuz I know Fame, I don't really know Footloose. Well, Fame was a dance movie about dancers. Yeah. More along the lines of trying to get to Juilliard and like professional dancing and stuff like that, whereas Footloose was about a small town that the preacher had said that dancing was evil and so it had been banned.

Yeah. And all of the teens would sneak off every year before their senior year to go to a dance in another town that they allowed it. And it was about the preacher's daughter going to one of these dances and finding out that you know dancing wasn't so evil but it could cause ripple effects in the community for It's a good movie. Yeah. Have you not seen it? Probably not. We could watch that one. I don't know. I'm trying to relate to anything in my life and I got the anything I can relate to is the computer room at break time we'll be pirating software and it's like you're not allowed to pirate software.

We're like no, we want to play Doom. We want to do all that. Well, it would it would be along the lines of you're evil because you play DND. Right. Yeah. I I know you've heard that. Yeah. It's the same concept. Yeah. How could you get any more beautiful in this area right here? Yeah. Well, I mean maybe if you couldn't look through there and see houses. Yeah. Why you got to All right. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Mess with my view. All right. Sorry. I thought you said there's no place to squirrel up here.

Oh, well well I don't know. It's relative to the other to the other bits nearby I was describing. It's uh it's relatively curated as to where you go. Now, I came down here and ruined my view. See, they've got a they do a woodland coppicing somewhere around or something like they chop wood that you can just get the wood. I thought this was kind of cool. Yeah. Look, someone tried to build a Yeah, there is a business around here that does uh chops wood and then you can get the lumber.

You know. Yeah, but this is actually intentionally placed. Someone's made a camp. Yeah. Perhaps even you could put like leaf branches. You could sleep under it. Uh it's not big enough to sleep under unless you're like a toddler. Well, just camp under there. I want to find a good nice walking stick. I want to pee without anyone seeing me. Oh, that's not sturdy enough on the bottom. How your legs and joints you still up for more walking? As I can be right now. I'm enjoying this.

You know, you're hugging a tree that says no dogs allowed on it. I I just love this stuff. They call it bracken. It just makes me think of being where the dinosaurs were. Cuz that was around in dinosaur times. I need a stick like this that's longer for a walking stick. Okay. Oh, like a staff. Like Gandalf's staff. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. If it were a little bit taller, it'd be better. Yeah. Maybe a little thinner, too. But it's this is nice and sturdy. If we run across Sauron, you know, he's in trouble.

If Sauron you know if Sauron this is just going to go oh, never mind. I probably shouldn't say that out loud. What's that? I mean yeah. Look at this rock. It's fantastic. Okay. I mean, it's got a chalky outside and a sort of slightly crystalline interior. Mhm. Beautiful. Slightly marbled. If you drop that Yeah. You are going to tussle. Okay. All right. As long as I don't meet the same fate as Sauron. Tolkien edited that bit of Lord of the Rings out where Sauron met Gandalf and Gandalf says you see this staff, Sauron?

This is going right up your Edited for Edited out. Look at this. Yeah. It's just a pipe in the middle of the woods. It doesn't make sense unless they're trying to drain water up to go back down. Yeah, it could just been left here. We're reaching some altitude, you know. Yeah, I came this way on purpose though cuz it wasn't as steep as Yeah. And the other path. That's gorgeous right there. Yeah. That little tangle of Yeah. fun branches. Ooh, is this a is this what I think It's like a little dell.

There's a looks like a pile of sticks in the middle. Oh, somebody's done the same thing up here. Lots of holly trees. And then they're not holly bushes. They're actual full-size trees. Oh, they did that. But as I say, they they do make use of the wood that gets coppiced or cut. Right. That's brilliant. I love that. I think they do it totally when you have a way. You know. It's like they're not just cutting down wood and then Right. nothing grows back. Okay. That's a better staff and Sauron's really in trouble with me now.

I know, right? Yeah. And then I can do this. It's got a kind of crook on it. Yeah. Beware the power of the staff. Exactly. Yeah. It's really only brutal from one end. Oh my God.

Is this going to be a like a spin-off of Lord of the Rings a dark romancy version? With Gandalf Gandalf and Sauron. Yeah. Yeah. This is really cool. I love that right there. Mhm. It'd be brilliant if I could 3D model that and Well, almost what you need to get is the dimensions between and the ratios like between one leaf node and another leaf node and the angles. And from that you can re you know use fractals to recreate the whole tree. I've got no idea how to do that but I have a feeling Claude might.

Are you comparing the staff to others So you I am. Thinking of swapping yours out. I'm thinking. Let me try this one out. This one's got a little See, now I can put like a little crystal on this. This is like arched an arched staff. So, you could make a bow out of that almost. And this is not Oh, this is not the straight wood. Yeah. This is my walking staff. Okay. It shall be decorated. Normally when we've visited places like when we went to the castle at Tunbridge and I was like no, you can't you can't really take stones away with you.

I I think there's a different vibe to this place that no one's going to mind if you take the odd branch with you. I mean, they they might object if you start without authorization taking huge piles of logs. I'm not trying to take anything but a walking stick. Yeah. Yeah. And even that is because I need a combination to get up this hill. Yeah. Ooh. I just turned to look around and look at look at where we've come from. Huh. I love it. Oh, let's see that little bird.

bird crawling its way up the tree. I've got no idea what that bird is. Huh. Do you see it? Yeah. Okay. Cute. It's about the size of a wren but I don't know that there is a wren. But in the urban places the wren is the only very small bird. Out here there are small birds. Yeah, somebody's practicing making shelters. Yeah. Yeah, they're even practicing or they're genuinely doing it. Well, I mean, it's not waterproof. Yeah. Well, I think the the whole thing is you lay fresh foliage over the top Yeah.

and it becomes waterproof. Yeah, but you they haven't attempted to do that. Well, I mean if you gather up all these pine cones Yeah. just sweep them up in there, you can make a good bed. Do you mean the needles or the pine? Yeah, the pine needles? Yeah. Okay. They make a good uh insect repellent. Oh, right. Oh, I didn't think of that but that's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah, I mean a few hundred years ago even you know everyone slept on straw. Even if you're a king or whoever you are.

Well, if you don't have straw, pine needles work too. Yeah, so comfortable as I'm stepping on it. Yeah. Feels so spongy. Exactly. All these pine needles. We have made it to the We've made it to a border. There's a fence. And well, you can crawl under or over it and it's maybe best not to. Feels like you can really breathe here. What's that? I can just Yeah, you just lean your lean your crook against this stuff against the tree. And it stands there. And then when you look up, it looks like you're in the middle of a crossing.

So, these pine trees above you. They really have so much holly here. Holly and these tall pines. Whatever kind of pine days. All the needles and the cones are right at the top of the tree. Right. They're not like halfway up. Cut those branches off on purpose to make them grow taller. It's growing in a snake-like the branch is that the branch or the trunk? Oh, what's happened is the trunk has been cut off and then the shoot has come up the side at an angle and then then gradually it's decided to grow upright.

But it's gone down in a spline to like an S shape before it gets to going upright. Yeah. And even then it's not exactly achieved it and it's swaying much more than any of the other branches. Yes, but does it make a sound if nobody's around? So, if a bear shits in the woods, does it smell if no one's around to smell it? If you clap with one hand, what sound does it make? Yeah. If there's if there's not a great deal of insects and lice, I would be happy to sit or lay here or even just on that fallen tree.

We could just sit there. I don't know what the range in the mic is. Come around and sit on this from the other direction. Yeah. Oh, I bonked my knee pretty dog on good. It's a good thing I have this. Sorry. I found myself a nice little perch. I I thought something you could talk about you could talk about um even if you only talk for like 5 or 10 minutes just about how you've used Blender and hooked it up to Claude and how you're using that in Second Life.

That's been a fun adventure. I don't think people realize how much scripting like actual code goes into Blender. Yeah. So, there is a mechanism to connect Claude to Blender and Claude can help you script like code the things that you want but you have to know how to do the prompting and be able to like whatever AI you're using has to be able to understand what you mean when you are giving a prompt. So, you have to have a little bit of a well, quite a bit of established communication with the AI.

Um How did you find out that you could hook up Claude in this way? I had opened Blender. I was trying to work on something in Blender and I was having a particular challenging moment where Blender was not working the way I wanted it to from the interface. And I shut it down and I went back to it like I don't know. Not too long later and when I opened it up, Blender had actually had a note that that was an available option. But I had also seen it somewhere else and I don't remember where.

It might have been on Facebook on one of the pages I follow. So, so basically it's using Python, isn't it? Yes. Yeah, it uses Python. And if you understand Python well enough, you can help direct to refine to make better quality objects. But if you don't know Python, you're just going to keep getting generic base boring you know it's not going to really be that great and impressive. Yeah. I'm just now to the point where I'm breaking through to be able to get the code to do what I want it to do to make the type of objects I want at the for Second Life land impact so that you know the geometry has to be right and have the right faces and and what not.

So, have you got some examples some objects that you've built? Well, for example, I've been making these kind of like I'm I'm calling them kind of like boho milk crate style shelving system like decorative shelving. And when I'm first putting in the prompts to give the design aesthetic that I'm wanting and seeing for for me the way I learn is to to see the process. So, I'm looking at the code that Claude has put out and seeing how that relates. I'm learning little by little as I go how to write the code myself or correct the code.

Um so, I basically use Claude to help I mean, we've talked about this a little bit before. I don't use it to create just you know random same objects that somebody else could create with AI. It's a very iterative process. You might spend hours and hours before you get the output the way that you want to. Days. Days. Days. To get exactly what I want. Yesterday, yeah, I worked on six different things before I got to the point where I had something that I was really like 100% proud of.

So, this wasn't the boxes. This was the lamp, wasn't it? I can just describe that. It's a just a like a table lamp but draped on top of it you've got a silken scarf that is translucent and when you've got it in Second Life you've got a transparent bulb inside the lamp that can actually turn on and off. And and actually so it's a functional illuminating lamp in Second Life. Yeah. But the the mesh for it you've created in Blender. Yes. Yeah. And you upload it.

It costs you a certain number of Linden to upload it if you don' have premium plus. Yeah. But if you have premium plus, then you don't cost anything. Yeah. Basically, I'm uploading enough now to make myself consider that I need premium plus again. Yeah. Cuz I've spent 500 Linden on uploads in the last week. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um I think you sold one of your books and I one of the ebooks the other day and I got a share of it. Mhm. But I think we've we've we've like retired those ebooks for the moment and we're working on new version.

Yeah, but the person that bought that knows that the version two is coming out. And they're going to get a free copy of the version They're getting a free copy of that. They they know what's going on. If it was somebody I didn't know, I would have addressed it much sooner. But with the new work and everything starting, I just kind of gave myself some grace because I know this person knows that life happens. Yeah. This person also knows that I am completely starting over from scratch with the Turning Page.

The only that genuine thing that I'm keeping, yes. The only thing genuine thing that I'm keeping is SL rate. The book the ebook rate. Yeah. Everything else is going to be my own meshes that I create. So, the right so wrongs of it is I've used go to render a PNG so an actual image file of the of the rendered page and serve that. And that it's then gets placed as the screen on the screen of the ebook. book. Mhm. And And um um rather than using the web engine built in you know in the media on the premium Second Life to uh render the text on the page is actually generating an image.

Um you get more control cuz you can adjust the font size and it's entirely within like the Go code and I'm not having to rely at all on how it chooses to render it in the media on the premium Second Life. Um that might be one reason that I decided to do that. And then yeah, it's we've got an index of everything on Project Gutenberg. And I think it's a frozen index in time, so I'm not sure it so it probably doesn't update as you go along, but given that Gutenberg doesn't get updated all that much compared to the size of catalog that it's got that dates back decades, it doesn't matter too much.

But what it does do it allows you to find any book and it will get the the plain text version of the book, so not the ePub or the PDF or whatever, just the plain text version of the book and it will also render that as a PNG and then that gets spliced onto the face of your e-reader in Second Life. And people can mount that on their hat, so that just means that they see it not not so much as a 3D object, but it's like a 2D object on the front of their screen.

It's a bit easier to use like that. It looks much nicer. It's more fluid. Yeah. And but we call this the light version because it's not doing the audio book cuz it's not connected to LibriVox. Yeah, nobody was using that. That was a that was a limitation actually because every single book we had to find the exact text in Gutenberg and the exact audio file in LibriVox and curate the catalogs, whereas this you've got access to pretty much the whole Gutenberg catalog of books that you might want to read.

Yeah. The only thing I haven't done is a dark mode. Um Dark mode would be nice. Yeah. Okay. But it's not like crucial urgent. My goal is to um have everything ready to upload on Friday cuz I have Friday to dedicate to that. So it's it's been a while since you've been really focusing on your Second Life store, hasn't it? It has. Everything going on. Um How's it feel to be back in business with that? That I have a direction that I'm really really happy with that I can long-term continue to build on.

I'm really happy with it. This breakthrough with being able to make my own mesh makes a huge difference because other creators who want to develop anything, you know, if they don't know how to use Blender, they have to buy full perm mesh. That's somebody else's creation that anyone else could purchase and texture and script the way they want to. And most of my objects are that at this moment. You've got thousands, maybe even tens of thousands. Paid for all of them. Yeah, I've got that you've bought with Linden.

Yeah, so I'm looking at that and going I don't want people to look at my items and go oh that's from that creator. Yeah. When you get to the point where you are at Yeah, you've been on it for like 20 years, so at some point you want to be like master of your own world and really having the ability to to create and Right. generate anything you want the way you want. Exactly. Without having to be reliant a hundred percent reliant on other people. We were talking earlier about Blender and being the breakthrough of being able to create stuff in Blender, but The lamp that you showed me the other day looks really photo realistic.

So that lampshade with both what's the scarf and the shade and the pole the you know the pole stand are all one object. Yeah. I had to know how to create a face so that I could make the scarf the entirety of the scarf top and bottom Yeah. the same texture, how to make them translucent while them being connected to the others. If you don't know anything about how to properly texture and in the course of that I textured my my bot head. Right? The head that I that I used to track being a a robot.

Right. I textured that, so I have to get a fresh one out and put it on. What did what exactly does the bot head do? Um the It manages it basically manages your movement and your teleports and and energy and stuff like that. And it basically at some point in time you will power off. This is a role-playing a system. It's not Yeah. Not everyone who plays Second Life has that. No. But you've you've opted into this. You're subscribed to this and you're paying for this in Linden.

Um to No, no, no. I I paid for the items for it. Right. I don't have this one I don't have to pay for extra objects. All right. It's not like BU or DFS or It's a kind of role-playing system where Yeah, yeah. You have stats and you have to maintain your stats. Is it the concept of it is that your character is a robot and it has certain needs like it has to recharge. A cyborg. Yeah. It has to recharge. It has to do certain things.

And what you do costs you energy and it can cost you energy, it can cost you voltage, it can cost cause you to overheat. It's a fun little system. We like it, but I had to take it off last night because I had like I said I textured two spots on the head and they couldn't read Right. whatever I was low on. Oh, voltage or not. Okay. And if you're low on voltage, you have to go charge. Yeah. Otherwise the your screen goes black and there's a sign on there that says you have to power on.

And so someone either has to come put you on a charger or you have to temporarily power yourself on with a code and quickly get to a charger and charge. I actually am building a system for the turning page. And it's uh basically like a cafe bookstore system. Right. Where What one that you could sell to other people? If people want to, yeah. I'm building it because it's what I want. Right. But I'm also building it because I can see other people wanting to use it.

This is this is what I think I see as the real good use case for AI. It's not to create a product that you're selling to millions of people, but just to create the product that you or a small group of people want to use. It's specifically tailored for you. Yeah. Well, and I'm I'm also not one thing that I'm very and I said this before, but I'm going to rehash this one over and over again because so many people are opposed to AI artistically because of this.

Nothing that I create is developed from anyone else's ideas other than my own. Yeah, you're you're not directly. Which is part of the reason I had to learn how to prompt Claude to be able to work with Blender because Claude starts with a box. Yeah. In Blender. Yeah. How am I going to how am I going to describe how I want that box to be distorted and manipulated to form exactly what I want? Yeah. So I have to be really adept at prompting. Yeah, my my experience even for work recently was I've been developing an authentication system and then someone I worked with they get AI to do a code review of my code and suggest changes.

And then I'm I'm like almost compelled to accept these changes, but I'm realizing that it doesn't understand my intention. Exactly. That and the background of why I'm doing it in such a way. And so it's making decisions and it's making the wrong decision sometimes. It's deciding to fix a bug rather than just remove the feature. Right. Because the feature is not worth hav- having because it's inherently problematic or or it's not good to have it in this release. And it's so it's it has found a bug and it has fixed it, but it's it's like it doesn't have the context to make that decision without being party to my whole development process.

Exactly. And that's kind of how I work with Blender too is is I have a general outline that you know this is the general idea of what I want. Claude outputs what it thinks that I am communicating and I look at it and I analyze it and I'm like okay see that you know I'll take a screenshot and say okay this right here I need it to look like this. And I do one bit at a time until I get what I want. I found that if you try and blanket change a bunch of things, it'll just randomly like Oh yeah, yeah.

You know on the cartoons where someone you know starts shape-shifting over and over and over again so they're a duck and then they're a bird and they're a fox and then they're a bear. Yeah. Yeah. That it it does something kind of like that. Yeah. Oh yeah, I mean I had to agree agree with the agent I was working with to that we keep any changes that we're doing scoped to narrow. Yeah. Not try and change everything at once. Cuz even if it can do that, it's not it doesn't help to do that cuz it just leads to more confusion.

But again with the way my brain works Yeah. It helps. It helps me get the results that I want without the stress and anxiety over Yeah. hitting a brick wall over and over again. Yeah. I I 100% understand why people are opposed to the use of unethical AI in government or unethical prompting, unethical usage. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to need you to come right here. Thank you.

Did you just grab the thorns? Silly man. Yeah. Oh, no, no. I'm used to these thorns. I mean, I've been brushing my friends sort of thing. Uh I've I've a way of dealing with I did go to Headley Heath and I've got this scar on my arm now from a bit of a scratch. I didn't even notice it at the time. And uh a guy who on HPR goes by the name of Troll, who I was with, he uh said oh Lee, you're bleeding. Um oh yeah, but I didn't know it was going to leave a scar, but it did.

I'm glad I have this stick. This is a steep hill. I'd be falling on my face. Yeah. Someone's made some sort of steps it seems out of These are uh Or are these just roots? Or they've naturally made steps. Yeah. I'm going to feel in this tonight. Especially in the morning. Okay. I think we need to go down that way, not this way. Yeah. Let's see if this So ooh. I mean, I'm puffed out. Yeah. I don't have arthritis. Oh. I probably wouldn't be feeling this if I hadn't uh knocked my knee.

Uh I I knocked my knee right on the side of the patella there. Yeah. Whoa. Look at this. This is a proper step way down. This is actual steps. Yeah. Are they wanting to come up? Uh I'm even more glad I got the stick now. This was cool. Robin Hood and Little John through the forest. You left the lord in the car, didn't you? I did. Yeah. And yes, I can use it. But I didn't figure either one of us wanted to carry it. No. To be honest, I didn't realize we were going to go on this much of a hike.

Otherwise, I would have brought it. It's a nice hike, though. Oh, look at that one. Mhm. Wait, did we come yeah on that on the way in? I don't think so. Or did we come out there? I think we came from a different angle. I don't know where we are. I say we take the gentler walk up to get back. What's considered the gentler walk up? Even we might not need to go up anymore. We could I was thinking Yeah. I wonder if Oh, look. There's a path through there.

Yeah, this is the gentler walk. You are correct. I I don't know how I got interested in Go. I think it was because I liked PHP, but I think maybe even Candy Cane Author left a comment that um he was thinking of changing his website to Go and I somehow I I did a bit of re- research, maybe not directly, and I realized Go is quite similar to PHP, but it's more modern in some ways. That way or that way? This will get us back to where we were, I think.

Um are you still like Python is like or LSL or like your two scripting languages? Hi Marily, yeah, because that's what I use the most. I've been using a bit of HTML and uh CSS and um stylesheet stuff and But you've been you've done HTML for years, haven't you? Oh, since to 19 late 1990s. Yeah. Not always actively, but it's always been like in my wheel well. When WordPress came out, I got kind of lazy. Yeah. And did WordPress for a long time just because that's what everyone else was wanting, so Yeah.

But it's been nice doing it again. Yeah, I don't know when it was whether it was like five years ago something suddenly the tide changed against WordPress has been the answer to everything and Well, that's because WordPress became far too big for its britches. Hm. I mean, I like what they've done with the block editor. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Don't get me wrong. I have a lot of good that I I I think I like WordPress because it allows the average person Well, there was something that we tried, you and me, we tried we tried a static site generator which runs on your PC Yeah.

and we realized that's not WYSIWYG either. It like almost promised it would be, but Oh, this is a totally different location. Uh should we say our goodbyes to our listeners at this point? Oh. So now that we have thoroughly bored them with our random nonsense? Yeah, hopefully it gets edited down to like five minutes, but yeah, goodbye from me and Goodbye from Elspeth. Bye. You have been listening to the Hacker Public Radio Podcast at hackerpublicradio.org. Today's show was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then visit the HPR site to find out how easy it really is.

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