3d-brain-animations

🧠 3D Brain Animations

Turn one sentence into a publication-ready 3D brain animation. A Claude skill that renders glowing, rotating brain regions from real anatomical atlases — for any species — without you touching Blender, code, or a 3D timeline.

One prompt. Zero-shot. Done.

You type this:

"Rotating rat hippocampus — CA1 then dentate gyrus glowing, rest of the brain semi-transparent."

…and you get the video above. No setup, no Blender wrangling, no trial and error. The skill picks the atlas, finds the regions, builds the scene, animates the reveal, renders, and encodes the MP4 on its own.

Why you'll want this

• 🐭🐀🧑 Any organism, real anatomy. Mouse, rat, human, zebrafish, and more — backed by 200+ BrainGlobe atlases. The regions are anatomically accurate meshes, not artistic approximations.
• ✨ Beautiful by default. Emissive glow + bloom, a semi-transparent "glass brain" for context, smooth turntable rotation, sensible lighting and framing — all out of the box.
• ⚡ Zero-shot from natural language. Describe the figure or animation in plain words; get a finished .png or .mp4. Great for papers, theses, talks, teaching, and social posts.
• 🪙 Extremely low token cost. All the heavy lifting lives in bundled scripts. Each render is just two shell calls and a tiny JSON spec — the agent never writes Blender code or inspects the API at runtime, so a render costs a handful of tokens, not thousands.
• 🔁 Iterate in seconds. "make it glow more", "human instead of rat", "one rotation each", "purple not blue" — every tweak is a one-line change and a re-render.

What you can make

…plus rotating turntable animations where regions light up solo, accumulate, or shine together.

How it works (tech stack)

The skill is the orchestration layer; everything under it is open, standard tooling:

On first use the skill checks for everything above and installs/downloads whatever is missing (into Blender's user folders, never the app bundle), so the only thing you need up front is Blender.

Install

git clone https://github.com/SamedVossberg/3d-brain-animations ~/.claude/skills/3d-brain-animations

That's it. The skill registers automatically in Claude Code. First render installs the Python deps + add-on and downloads your chosen atlas (a few minutes, once); after that it's instant.

Requirements: Blender installed, and Claude Code.

Use it

Just ask, in your own words:

"Render a glass mouse brain with the thalamus orange and hippocampus blue." "Animate the human hippocampus CA1 glowing, one full rotation, rest transparent." "Make a rotating rat brain, cerebellum pink and cortex teal, then make it glow more."

Or invoke it explicitly with /3d-brain-animations.

Under the hood each request becomes:

bash scripts/run.sh setup <atlas>          # idempotent: install/enable/download
bash scripts/run.sh render /tmp/spec.json  # -> figure.png or animation.mp4

…driven by a compact JSON spec (region acronyms, colors, glow, rotation). See SKILL.md for the full spec and options.

Credits

Built on the wonderful work of the BrainGlobe project and Artem Kirsanov's BlenderBrain. Rendering by Blender. Atlas meshes belong to their respective atlas authors — please cite the atlas you use.

License

MIT © Samed Vossberg. (The tools it orchestrates keep their own licenses.)