.blend URL Viewer

Simon Willison has been playing with GPT-6 Astra and Blender, and this time the experiment ended up as a small web tool: .blend URL Viewer. The point is simple enough. Feed it a Blender file, and you can inspect the model in your browser without opening Blender itself.

The project started with a prompt to ChatGPT Images 2.5: generate a photo of a Fabergé egg themed after the TV show Pluribus, and research first. The result was good enough to be interesting on first pass, which is usually where these things stop being a gimmick and start becoming a workflow.

Willison then took that image and handed it to Codex running GPT-6 Astra in high mode, asking it to create a Blender model of the egg using a local skill. That part took 17m51s and produced several .blend files. Not one. Several.

He already had a vibe-coded Blender viewing experiment sitting around, so he folded it into his tools collection. The result is a browser-based way to look at the Pluribus Blender model he generated, which is a neat example of how these systems are increasingly being used as a chain rather than a single prompt-and-pray moment.

There’s a practical lesson here: the interesting part isn’t just the image or the model, it’s the glue. A browser viewer, a local skill, a coding agent, a generated image, and a very specific creative prompt all snap together into something usable. That’s the real AI story most people miss while they’re busy arguing about the demo.