Costly signaling
My second AI-built 3D short saved 2 hours from the first
Yesterday I made my first 3D explainer short with Claude driving Blender. It was about the Diderot effect and took about six hours from start to finished file. This morning I made the second one, on costly signalling, the Rory Sutherland idea that waste can be the whole point. A £30,000 wedding doesn't make you any more married than a £300 one. What the extra money buys is proof.
It took about 4 hours 10 minutes from the first message to the finished video. Most of that was the computer rendering on its own:
| Stage | Time |
|---|---|
| Topic research, script, storyboard | ~35 min |
| Finding and importing 3D models (Sketchfab, Poly Haven) | ~45 min |
| 2K test stills, fixes, voice, shot timing | ~30 min |
| Animation, 2 fps preview, music mix, 3D title | ~30 min |
| My hands-on time | ~1 h 50 min |
| Full render, 1,324 frames, unattended | ~2 h 20 min |
What changed since video one
After the first video I had Claude write down where the time went. Then I turned that list into rules and a small toolkit before starting the second one.
- No setup. The installs and checks took 40 minutes the first time. This time they took nothing.
- Ready-made hero models. Last time a hand-built robe took 1.5 hours and failed twice. This time the peacock, cake, scale and seal all came from Sketchfab. Fixes were quick: correcting the import scale and rotation, and re-cropping one letter scan.
- Reused scripts. The scene, shot-timing, captions, sound-mix and render scripts were copied from video one. Most of the new work was changing the shot list and the frame timings.
- The voice is chosen once. I generated the Slax voice before timing any shots, and every cut lands on a spoken word. Last time a wasted voice-clone take cost about 900 credits. This time the one take cost about 700.
- Music brief early. I made two Suno versions of "Here Comes the Bride", one grand and one toy-piano. They crossfade on the word "cheaper".
- Preview before rendering. A rough 2 fps preview showed two dull shots, which we fixed before any full-quality frame was rendered.
- Captions and render in one unattended command. It restarts a stalled render, produces both the captioned and clean versions, and writes the credits for the description.
The saving
The total time went from about 6 hours to about 4. My own time at the keyboard roughly halved, from about 3.5 hours to under 2. Most of the remaining time is GPU rendering that runs while I do something else. The peacock was the heaviest model, so this render took longer per frame than last time.
Still to learn
I asked for the 3D title after the render had started, and that cost a restart. It goes on the checklist with the other up-front questions. Next time, the title, the music and the ending all get decided before the first frame.