Lullen and Dumpy are the raccoon and the flaming blue dumpster from the Lullen new-tab extension, and I asked Claude to rebuild them as 3D models in Blender and make them wave and then be cute together. The first attempt was recognisable but loose. The second was built against measurements of the original art. Lullen has been submitted to its store and is awaiting approval; it is not listed yet. The method behind this is in the Blender, Claude and MCP post.
What did the first build get wrong?
Shown below at the same framing as the original tile: the reference, the first build, and the rebuild. In the first build the flame was a cone that covered 0.0312 of the frame against 0.0205 in the reference, and the hat was a thin ring covering 0.0034 against 0.0084.
How do you measure a 3D model against a drawing?
I rendered a flat orthographic still from the scene, matched to the tile’s framing, then split both images into colour classes (blue body, orange flame, teal hat, cream, grey fur) and compared each class’s bounding box, area and average colour. The palette was sampled from the reference by median pixel, and the flame silhouette was traced from the reference’s height profile instead of guessed.
How close did it get?
Closer, not identical. Hat area went from 0.0034 to 0.0098 against a reference of 0.0084. The cream area was 0.0198 against 0.0203. The blue dumpster was 0.0841 against 0.0788. The flame area is still about 36% too large (0.0279 against 0.0205), the blue is around 4% darker, and the flame is slightly dimmer. Differences I did not fix: the lid is a flat grey slab where the original is slate, the side handles are boxy instead of loops, Lullen has no mouth or nose detail, and the “Lullen” title text and the floor texture are missing. So this is an approximation, not a recreation.
What changed between the two videos?
Both are 192 frames. The grid shows frames 1, 100 and 170: the top row is the first video, the bottom row the rebuild. Between them I also widened Dumpy’s final spacing, because at frame 96 he overlapped Lullen’s face.
What did the new Blender skill change?
The private blender-ops skill forced a probe of the Blender version before building, rendering in the background, and checking the video from inside Blender. This session then produced six more rules (now version 1.1.0): wait outside the bridge instead of sleeping inside it, redraw before a screenshot, restrict segmentation to the objects being measured, and clean up scratch objects without deleting parents. More on that in the first post. The same characters, drawn in 2D, are on the Lullen release post, and the project is listed on the projects page.
Not verified: how the model would look in another renderer, and whether the extension passes store review. Numbers are from one Blender 5.2.3 session. More in the history page.