14/07/2026
... I've been experimenting with AI in our field - trying to evaluate, honestly and critically, whether any of it is actually useful for the way we work. I've sat through the workshops. The early Automatic1111 + ControlNet days were essentially long sessions of filling in parameters and hoping the output resembled your input. ComfyUI made it much nicer - genuinely flexible, real potential - but it's still a rig you have to learn and maintain. Cloning repos, command lines, dependency hunting, an evening gone before the first image.
At some point I realized that for one very specific, very common task, I didn't want any of that ceremony. The task: I've blocked out a massing model, and I want to show the idea rather than a gray box. Not a final render. A fast, readable concept - shape and light, a few seconds, without leaving Blender.
So I built the thing I wanted. DraftCraft captures your viewport, takes the exact depth from your geometry and runs a local Stable Diffusion XL pipeline with a depth ControlNet. The result holds your massing and perspective. It runs entirely on your own GPU - nothing uploaded, no credits, no subscription.
And the setup: There is nothing to clone, nothing to compile, no command line. You install the add-on, click two buttons (engine, models), and it lives inside your 3D software from then on, offline. All the plumbing is still there - it's just not your problem anymore. Honestly, even if Blender weren't your main tool, exporting a massing into it just for this would be a perfectly reasonable workflow....
Neither of these replaces a visualizer, and neither replaces the concept sketch you draw with your own hand and head - the judgment and intent aren't in here. The output is 1024×1024 and it is a concept image, full stop. I'd rather you be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.
Still - and I say this as someone who's usually the skeptic in the room - the distance from "gray box" to "usable concept" collapsing to a few seconds hasn't stopped feeling like a small piece of magic to me. Low-res, imperfect, not art. But it's there before you finish your coffee, and it's yours, on your machine....
Full Article on Blender Artist:
https://blenderartists.org/t/paid-add-on-draftcraft-local-ai-concept-renders-from-the-viewport/1647703