Simon Willison Releases Web-Based .blend File Viewer
Simon Willison introduced a web tool called .blend URL Viewer that allows users to view Blender 3D files directly in their browser using URLs from GitHub or web links. The tool was shared alongside an experiment where he used GPT-6 Astra in Codex with a custom skill to automatically convert an AI-generated 2D image into a complete 3D Blender model. This project highlights the growing capability of LLM coding agents to autonomously generate complex 3D assets programmatically inside Blender. Additionally, it offers a quick, zero-installation way for developers and 3D artists to inspect Blender scene assets over the web. The viewer resolves public GitHub repository URLs via jsDelivr and renders scene meshes, curve data, and approximate materials while reporting metrics like vertex and triangle counts. In Willison's demonstration, GPT-6 Astra ran for nearly 18 minutes to produce a detailed egg model containing over 1.4 million triangles and 17 materials.
## BACKGROUND
Blender is a popular open-source 3D graphics suite that stores scenes in a proprietary `.blend` binary file format. Because `.blend` files utilize an internal self-describing DNA/RNA data structure, rendering them in a web browser typically requires custom JavaScript parsers to extract geometry and materials without running Blender locally.