Token-Verbrauch von Blender MCP gemessen: 72 Claude-Code-Durchläufe im Test

People say hooking Blender up to Claude through MCP eats tokens. I couldn't find a single measurement, so I took the most popular server, MCP for Blender, and ran it 72 times in Claude Code: describing scenes, building furniture, recolouring and checking with screenshots, two worst cases, and one showcase, a racing car with a chase camera. I also ran every task through the small proxy I built for browser MCP, now version 0.3, to see whether it helps here.

(Cost at Opus 5.5 API prices, as reported by Claude Code.)

The largest text result in these 25 runs was 2,347 characters. The current MCP for Blender is already careful: scene info lists 20 objects per call by default and screenshots default to 768 pixels. Most of each request (about 25,000 tokens) is Claude Code's own instructions, sent again at every step.

I asked for a low-poly racing car of its own design, a circuit with a corner, a 5-second animation through the corner and a chase camera. Claude did it in about 10 requests and 93 seconds, for $0.47 on average ($0.42 to $0.56 over 5 runs). All 10 runs, with and without the proxy, produced a working animation. I rendered them afterwards in EEVEE; that took about 90 seconds per clip on the GTX 1650 and is not part of the measured cost.

I asked Claude to print every property of all 580 objects. The script returned 122,373 characters. Claude Code refused it as too large, so Claude ran it again in four chunks of about 32,000 characters each, and all four stayed in the context:

Printing all 19,042 vertices of a sphere did not get that far: Claude Code refused it, and Claude reported that the vertices were printed and stopped there: $0.17.

It sits in front of the server and passes every tool through. For Blender, version 0.3 does two things:

{ "mcpServers": { "blender": { "command": "npx", "args": [ "-y", "github:johnisking/tokensave-mcp-diet", "--", "uvx", "mcp-for-blender" ] } } } Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Task Cost, as shipped With the proxy Change Print every property of 580 objects (3 runs) $0.873 $0.166 −81% Racing scene (5 runs) $0.471 $0.445 −6% Everyday tasks (5 runs each) $0.16 to $0.23 $0.15 to $0.21 −4% to −8% To be honest about the rest: the proxy cut image tokens on the racing scene by 62%, but images were a small part of the input, so the scene cost only 6% less, and that is within run-to-run noise. The small-room description, where the proxy changed nothing at all, came out 4% cheaper too. So the everyday differences are noise.

The proxy is a safety net for the long-output case, not a discount on every task.

One bug I hit on the way: MCP for Blender also returns each result as structuredContent, and Claude Code shows that instead of the text, so my first diet runs of the long-output task were not shortened at all. Version 0.3 now shortens those fields too, and I re-ran those tasks after the fix.