Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-09-17. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.
Original post
The Minimax H3 video model takes a blender contact sheet render and puts it into a coherent video footage. This surprised me. It was a great approximation of the actual blender geometry. Consider this first portrait style video of the objects. I’ll provide the contact sheets at the end of the article if you’d like to see or use them yourself.
Inspired by the idea that the video model could work with the contact sheet as a coherence reference of a character, I tossed in another and tried applying a pencil sketch style to see what would happen. The result is a hand drawn sketch that I’m not sure how I’d even think about doing in blender.
That these opensource video models apply style and work with blender reference renders with such ease opens up a few new directions with the modeling pipeline. This meant that I could combine two incredible ideas: Firehawk and Mara Voss into one video amazing action video.
Fun stuff. Nothing like a literal cliff-hanger!
The odd-looking geometry and artifacts are based on these contact sheets that I posted about a few days back. You can see the gallery here:
EricBlender: Ashwicke’s Gallery Gets Too LargeThis post contains just ~20 3D models that were produced over the scheduled activities of blender. I disabled the agent tasked with this work faced with a perplexing question of “what do I do with all of these”. I’ve gone thru and pulled down these builds that I thought demonstrated an interesting rage of ideas, perspiration and creativity by the agent…Read more8 days ago · EricConnected work
- Mara Voss in VideoLab: Watch the H3 motion studies beside the finished short.
- Mara Voss and the Mechanical Monsters: See how the motion work came together as a complete film.
- Local AI: MiniMax H3 on an NVIDIA 3080: Read the earlier local H3 experiment on the same hardware class.