Slates Blender

Slates for Blender

Block your shot in 3D, then let the model dress it.

A Blender add-on that lets a Claude/Codex agent build a **blocking pass** — untextured grey boxes and a camera path — render it to mp4, and hand that clip to Slates as a reference video. The model then renders a world around a camera path it no longer has to invent.

**Why bother:** a text prompt makes the model invent the camera, so it invents differently every roll and you pay for each one. A reference video removes the invention. Iteration moves to the free half.

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Install

1. Download slates_blender-.zip from https://slates.video/blender.
2. Blender → Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Add-ons ▸ Install from Disk, pick the zip.
3. In the 3D viewport press N, open the Slates tab, click Start Bridge.

Requires **Blender 5.1+**. The floor is deliberate — the bundled API reference is the 5.1 set, and an agent grepping 4.x docs to write 5.x `bpy` is worse than one with no docs at all.

Then, wherever your agent runs:

npm i -g @slatesvideo/cli
slates login

The Slates MCP server finds this Blender automatically while the bridge is running. There is no second connector to configure.

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What the agent gets

Six tools, on top of the ~76 Slates ops it already has:

Tool	Does
slates_blender_status	Is a bridge reachable, and the scene summary if so
slates_blender_execute	Run bpy Python; returns whatever the code assigns to result
slates_blender_scene	Frame range, fps, camera keyframe times, object tree
slates_blender_docs	Look up a dotted Blender API identifier
slates_blender_search_docs	Full-text search of the bundled API reference and manual
slates_blender_render_blocking	Render the scene camera to mp4 and import it into a Slates project

There is deliberately **no camera-move library**. Camera work is written as `bpy` against the Blender documentation the add-on ships. A fixed menu of moves w