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Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk

Originally published 2026-09-08 on Advisory Hour.

Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-09-08. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.

Original post

Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk image from the original Advisory Hour post.

Astra seems capable of taking an idea and continuing to polish it in ways that other models could never achieve. I wrote yesterday about using Astra to build an articulated car to robot transformation sequence. Today’s build adds lighting, a city, and a finger level of polish to the car.

Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk image from the original Advisory Hour post.

The asphalt road buckles and breaks beneath the weight of the robot. The city buildings fill a large cityscape.

Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk image from the original Advisory Hour post.

Since I had a handful of elevenlabs credits, I also asked Astra to use my elevenlabs account to replace the procedurally generated audio using the elevenlabs SFX model. The results are a much-improved soundscape that with the broader representative of the capabilities of Astra. I’ve never had a model produce these kinds of results and am just awe-struck.

Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk image from the original Advisory Hour post.

Compare the above image to the build I posted on Sunday of this car, which is just below here. It shows just how many tight improvements were made around the model and scene. You’d even be convinced it was two different systems, but it wasn’t. Astra just needed a bit more time to work.

Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk image from the original Advisory Hour post.
Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk image from the original Advisory Hour post.

What’s even better is the Full Video.

Blender: Astra Polishing Round on FireHawk video 1 from the original Advisory Hour post.

What I learned from this project is that Astra is so remarkably capable that you can in a few iterations reach a more refined version of an idea. I also learned that there is a distinct shortage of Astra tokens in my account.

See the original build is linked to below. It’s incredible how far this was able to go.

EricBlender: OpenAI’s Astra makes a car to robot animationThe 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…Read more3 days ago · Eric

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