Importing from Blender

Kanzi AI Assistant can bring a Blender scene into your Kanzi Studio project — geometry, lights, Principled-BSDF materials, the camera, an HDRI environment, and a rendered background. It does this by running Blender for you in the background to extract the scene, then recreating it with Kanzi resources.

This is separate from dragging a .glb or .fbx model onto the chat window (see Importing 3D models). The Blender pipeline brings across lighting and environment as well as geometry and materials.

Prerequisites

You need a local Blender installation. Kanzi AI Assistant looks for Blender in its default installation directory under Program Files (Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender *). If you installed Blender elsewhere, set the BLENDER_PATH environment variable to the full path to blender.exe. If Kanzi AI Assistant cannot find Blender, it tells you and the import stops.

Blender runs headlessly during the import, so you do not need to have it open.

Preparing your Blender scene

For the import to capture everything, set up the .blend scene so that:

  • Materials use the Principled BSDF shader. Kanzi AI Assistant extracts Principled-BSDF material parameters and texture channels (base color, normal, roughness, metallic, emissive). Kanzi AI Assistant does not convert materials built from other shader nodes.

  • The scene contains a panoramic camera (a camera set to the Panoramic type with Equirectangular projection) if you want the HDRI environment and background. Kanzi AI Assistant bakes the environment from this camera; without it the export fails. You can skip the environment and background if you do not need them.

Running the import

Ask Kanzi AI Assistant in the chat — for example, “Import the lighting, materials, and environment from my Blender scene at C:\path\to\scene.blend”. Kanzi AI Assistant runs a two-step pipeline:

  1. Export — Kanzi AI Assistant launches Blender to bake an equirectangular HDRI, render a background image, and extract the lights and Principled-BSDF materials into a bundle (a directory on disk that is the handoff between Blender and Kanzi).

  2. Import — Kanzi AI Assistant applies the bundle to your project.

Baking the HDRI can take a while; Kanzi Studio stays responsive during the bake.

What gets imported

From the bundle, Kanzi AI Assistant recreates:

  • Geometry — the meshes, imported as the active scene.

  • Lights — Kanzi light nodes matching the Blender lights (point, spot, directional).

  • Materials — physically based material instances built from the Principled-BSDF values and textures, bound to the meshes.

  • Shader configuration — the KANZI_SHADER_* preprocessor definitions (light counts, tone mapping) set to match the scene.

  • Environment — the baked HDRI, applied as image-based-lighting cubemaps.

  • Background — a sky sphere built from the rendered background image.

  • Camera — the scene’s active camera.

You do not have to import everything. Ask Kanzi AI Assistant for only the parts you want — for example, only materials and lights — and it imports that subset.

Managing imported assets

Ask Kanzi AI Assistant to list, re-import, or delete assets it has imported. Re-importing is useful after you change the source file.

Troubleshooting

  • Blender not found — install Blender to its default location, or set BLENDER_PATH to your blender.exe.

  • No environment or background imported — the scene needs a panoramic (equirectangular) camera; add one and re-run.

  • Materials look gray or untextured — physically based materials need a light in the scene to be visible; make sure Kanzi AI Assistant imported the lights.

  • The export takes too long — ask Kanzi AI Assistant to lower the sample count or skip the HDRI bake while you iterate.