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Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation

Originally published 2026-09-06 on Advisory Hour.

Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-09-06. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.

Original post

Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The following animation sequence was a two-shot prompt of Astra modeling a car from scratch and then creating a transformation sequence of that car into a fun animation sequence. This was with ‘medium’ thinking level. The prompt was three sentences. The fist bump at the end was the third sentence.

Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation video 1 from the original Advisory Hour post.

There are a lot of details that could stand to be corrected with the car, the robot, and the transformation sequence. Still, there’s so much that’s done right and to watch Astra was tasked with doing this using only it’s ComputerUse skill. There’s no MCP or API integration. There’s so many little details in the model details, too.

Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.

There is a lot of chatter about robot hands on the internet right now. Astra did a remarkable job modeling robot hands for this video.

Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.

Hands that in the animatic are shown to move into a fist, which the robot then uses to prepare itself for a fight.

Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.

Astra didn’t quite use the ComputerUse skill to model the character or animation sequence. Instead, it wrote a tremendous amount of python code that then re-generated a blender file.

Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.

And it’s just bonkers to open that blender file and move around in it, or even look at the wireframe.

Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The sound design was unexpected. I didn’t explicitly ask for audio. Astra built a procedurally generated transformation sound based on simple acoustic elements, and timed it with the entire animation.

Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation audio 1 from the original Advisory Hour post.

The animation sequence itself is packed inside of blender.

Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: OpenAI’s Astra Makes a Car-to-Robot Animation image from the original Advisory Hour post.

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