Dustin Hollywood previews a Stages workflow linking Blender scenes to Seedance

• CUE links Stages, Blender and a Seedance render in a new workflow preview.
• A separate Blender task reached its first render in 3:54 for a 30-second, 720p animation, according to the timing report.
• A Stages Connect plugin for TouchDesigner is also coming that week, according to the plugin announcement.

Dustin Hollywood, founder of Stages, previously teased a library of 100 camera rigs in his Blender experiments. His earlier description of Stages Connect says CUE can package newly created workflows as reusable skills and plugins.

Hollywood lays out the pipeline in three steps:

1. Stages: CUE directs the work.
2. Blender: Scene and animation work happens in the 3D application.
3. Stages: Seedance renders the result.

He attributes the run to Stages CS and CUE, saying neither Claude nor Codex helped.

He separately posted a simple 19-bone rig made by CUE while controlling Blender. The rig is the preview’s strongest creative detail.

In a separate Blender task, Hollywood reports 3:54 from the user’s first task message to the first rendering. He describes an intermediate-level task with these specifications:

• 720p output.
• A 30-second animation.
• Dynamic camera-shot design.
• Rigged animation, rendered and saved.

He says neither the fast nor ultrafast setting was enabled. The reported time covers this Blender task, with no end-to-end Seedance timing supplied.

For his film The Beginning, Hollywood posted a production list running to 778 shots.

• Input: He says he loaded the film’s shots into his agent.
• Shot count: He describes 778 as the script-required list and puts his system’s edit-needed failure rate at roughly 2%, with corrections initiated automatically, in a reply about the production.
• Direction: He credits a prompting methodology he developed for the system.

Filmmaker GlennHasABeard describes a separate workflow for painterly animated shorts:

• Blender previs: Plan the camera before rendering.
• Wan 3.0 and Seedance: Generate the shots.

Hollywood also teased a STAGES CONNECT plugin for TouchDesigner, saying it would arrive that week. In his earlier Stages Connect post, he described MCP-based control of third-party creative applications.

Hollywood announced an open demo day on October 22. Stages advertises these entry tiers:

• Free: Core canvas, CUE preview and community marketplace.
• $29/month: Bring-your-own-key routing, full generation engines and versioned moodboards.

The demo announcement and those plan descriptions do not specify which tier includes the demonstrated Blender-to-Seedance workflow.