This episode of Denoised starts with a simple test that lands somewhere bigger: feeding a handful of cell-phone photos to OpenAI's Codex and asking it to reconstruct a real building in Blender. From there we get into the AI Odyssey trailer everyone argued about, Foundry's SmartRoto for Nuke, Seedance 2.5's pricey teaser, and America's first genuinely competitive open-weights model. It also serves as our SIGGRAPH primer, since the show is landing in LA and we will both be there.
Quick Take
One quick test set the theme for the whole episode: a coding agent took cell-phone snapshots of a theater and rebuilt it as editable Blender geometry in roughly 10 minutes. That reframes a bigger argument we keep having on the show about where AI fits into a 3D pipeline. Is the future fully synthetic generation, or is it 3D doing the precise structural work while AI handles the final look? The AI Odyssey trailer, Seedance 2.5, and a new wave of open-weights models all push on the same question from different angles.
What We're Watching: SIGGRAPH Lands in LA
SIGGRAPH runs in LA, which makes it easy to reach for people in media and entertainment. Addy's framing: it is NAB for the research crowd, where university labs and companies show work that can be five or ten years out. Netflix already teased some of the papers it plans to present, and the density of AI researchers makes the show a recruiting event as much as a technical one.
Two satellite events are worth flagging. The ASWF Open Source Days sessions run on Sunday and dig into the open standards, like USD and OpenTimelineIO, that this episode keeps circling back to.
There is also a free AI Workflows Summit on Tuesday evening that does not require a SIGGRAPH pass, with talks on static Gaussian splats from NVIDIA, real-time volumetric workflows, and a ComfyUI agentic tool called ComfyCode.ai that runs locally and hooks into production-grade pipeline standards. We are moderating the closing panel there.
What We Tested: Codex Rebuilt the Culver Theater in Blender
Here is the test that opened the episode. We pointed OpenAI's Codex, its coding agent and answer to Claude Code, at Blender and asked it to install the tooling itself.
The agent found the third-party Blender MCP server, set it up, and connected to Blender without hand-holding.
Then came the real ask: rebuild the Culver Theater and its surrounding block using a few phone photos shot at AI on the Lot. These were not ideal reference images, mostly one-sided, with no clean angle on the corner. The Art Deco detailing (curved forms, the sphere held up on top, intricate trim) is exactly the geometry a human modeler would dread.
The result, after one revision pass asking for a more rounded corner door, was a strong starting point rather than a finished asset.
What it got: the overall massing, the lamps, the rounded corners, and a believable interpretation of the Art Deco floor stamping and side-wall movie posters that were barely visible in the source photos.
What it missed: the theater marquee sign was the most obvious error, and it skipped several of the door windows.
Why it still matters: the geometry came in cleanly separated in the outliner, ready to modify. It even generated a camera move and, on request, relit the scene as a moody night exterior, though some emissive values landed on trim that should not glow.
The whole build took around 10 minutes once the server spun up, and the agent felt notably more responsive driving the computer than screen-reading control loops we have used before.
Where 3D Becomes the Pilot and AI Becomes the Renderer
The test crystallized a prediction we have been building toward. For our own work, photoreal accuracy is not the point; a gray-box model that gets you 70% of the way there gives you real geometry to run camera moves and feed into video-to-video passes, with generative cleanup handling the rest.
Addy's larger read: a year or two ago the assumption was that generative AI would pull production from 3D back to flat 2D, because why build in 3D when you can reach final pixel directly. That was wrong. You still need 3D for control, for the specific camera move, for the sphere held up by four supports. The workflow taking shape is 3D as the pilot doing the precise structural work, and AI as the renderer filling the photorealism gap. As GPUs push from billions of polygons toward trillions and inference keeps getting faster, the pitch is an AI 3D operator that handles modeling, shading, and rigging under the hood while a director just talks to the scene.
