Animate simply. Render beautifully.
Nova is a native 3D animation app for character animators, from blocky Minecraft-style rigs today to imported 3D models, now in development. It keeps animating simple, renders with a modern Direct3D 12 engine, and opens your existing Mine-imator projects.
Native Direct3D 12, built on GTAO, PCSS and image-based lighting.
Character animators who outgrow simple block-animation tools hit the same walls: heavy scenes slow down, lighting and reflections run out, and the interface gets in the way on big projects. The usual next step, a general 3D suite, means relearning everything.
Nova keeps an approachable way of animating and opens your existing .miproject files, but runs on an engine written from scratch: modern light, shadows, reflections and glow, with render fixes shipped behind a switch that restores the exact old output.
Animators and YouTube creators who make character-driven shorts and series: blocky Minecraft-style rigs today, imported 3D models as that work matures. People who want better-looking frames without the learning curve of a general 3D suite.
Scroll through eight records. Every image was rendered in a Nova development build, and carries its date.
Long, soft sun shadows with clean transitions between shadow cascades: the seams were reduced 9.4 times in August. A self-healing shadow cache survives GPU memory pressure.
A closed room lit by one ceiling light: ambient occlusion plus global illumination fill the shadows, and the red and green walls tint the ceiling and floor.
Screen-space reflections and true planar mirrors are on by default, and mirrors reflect the whole sky: sun, moon, stars and clouds.
God rays, eight moon phases, stars and a sun disc are live by default. Here a sunset streams through a colonnade.
Glow is built from the scene's real HDR light before tonemapping, so bright highlights such as magic and emissive blocks keep their colour.
Physically based materials: roughness, metalness, emission and transparency, set per material, all mirrored in a glossy floor. Particle blocks use the material you set too.
Depth of field, driven by the camera's settings, melts the courtyard lights into soft bokeh. Fine, pixel-sized film grain is on by default.
Nova opens your existing Mine-imator projects (.miproject), including older format versions. An older file is upgraded once, then loads without converting again.
Before a pixel is lit, Nova knows which way it faces, how far away it is, and what it is made of.
The same courtyard frame from a Nova development build, shown through developer debug views. Magenta marks the sky, where there is no surface.
Proven real-time techniques in the current development build, all on by default; the tonemapping curve is a per-project option.
Measured, not promised. Every number comes from the dated patch notes and the project history.
A native Direct3D 12 engine built on GTAO, PCSS soft shadows and image-based lighting. Shadows, bounced light, god rays, depth of field, glow and backlit leaves are each rendered off and on in the gallery.
Milliseconds of CPU stall per frame while scrubbing the timeline. Measured in August 2026 on a dev build.
Scrubbing got 58% faster and shadow cost per frame fell 93% in the same round of work. Measured in August 2026 on a dev build.
The main source file was split into modules, from 77,072 lines to about 10,700, and GPU debug-layer errors on the test scenes went from 3,885 to 0.
Every merge runs the full product test suite, and render fixes ship with a switch that restores the exact old output.
In 22 headless test cases, the same frame came out byte-identical across separate runs. And Nova opens your existing Mine-imator projects, including older format versions.
Sunset light through a colonnade. Drag the handle, or focus it and use the arrow keys.
Both frames come from the same demo scene and camera, rendered by Nova. Only the god rays setting changes. The gallery has the same kind of check for shadows, bounced light, depth of field, glow at night and backlit leaves.
What works today, what is experimental and switched off by default, and what is planned. None of it is a release date.
A native C++ engine on Direct3D 12, built from scratch.
Opens existing Mine-imator projects, including older format versions. An older file is upgraded once, then loads without converting again.
Long, soft sun shadows with clean cascade transitions (seams reduced 9.4 times), and a shadow cache that heals itself under GPU memory pressure.
Ambient occlusion plus global illumination: light bounces around a room, fills the shadows and carries the colour of nearby walls.
Screen-space reflections and true planar mirrors, on by default. Mirrors reflect the whole sky: sun, moon, stars and clouds.
God rays, eight moon phases, stars and a sun disc, live by default.
Glow built from the scene's real HDR light, so bright highlights keep their colour.
Metalness, roughness, emission and transparency per material. See-through materials blend; they do not bend light.
Subsurface scattering: sunlight glows through backlit leaves.
Depth of field with soft bokeh, driven by the camera's settings, and fine pixel-sized film grain, on by default.
AgX and PBR Neutral are available as options, and Nova's AgX was checked against Blender's on a test set.
Semi-transparent textures composite without washed-out ghosting. On the test frame, the error against the reference fell from 15.12 to 10.66.
Multi-sample renders average real light, not graded pixels.
A preview window with Shaded, Half, Full and Render modes that honours your sample count: 1, 4, 16 or 64.
Copy keyframes from one character and paste them onto another, matched by part name.
Particle bursts and their random frames come out the same whether you play, scrub or export.
In 22 headless test cases, the same frame came out byte-identical across separate runs.
Scrubbing never waits on the GPU: the CPU stall went from 12.8 ms to 0. Preview playback got 48% faster and scrubbing 58% faster (August 2026).
An automatic video-memory budget, so smaller GPUs scale back instead of crashing, and a frame cap that keeps the GPU cool while Nova sits in the background.
Saving runs in the background and only says "saved" once the file is really written, and an export never reports success when its final write failed. Settings live in one folder, with a portable mode.
Huge resource packs load safely, oversized render sizes are clamped, and broken or oversized skins and world files are refused instead of crashing.
Built and switched off by default for now.
Teal themes and cleaner panels, landing behind a switch.
GLB, glTF and OBJ models with rigs and animation, behind a switch and paused for now. Imported characters move part by part; smooth skinning is planned.
Projects saved with the older basic engine setting now use the same full-quality path as everything else. Projects without that setting render exactly as before.
A separate tool lets an AI assistant such as Claude edit a project's animation file through more than 20 typed tools.
Off by default: the assistant works inside a running Nova session and can import objects into the open scene. Each change is one undo step, and a change is refused if you edited the same objects after the assistant read them.
Objects drawn with alpha hashing cast shadows with the same hashing, so the shadow matches the surface. Off by default and approved to switch on.
Bounced light captured from the surrounding scene, including off-screen geometry. Off by default and still under visual review.
In progress: the height-correlated Smith masking term that modern engines use for specular highlights, approved as the new default.
In progress: shared groundwork for temporal effects such as anti-aliasing, built in steps that leave the picture unchanged.
Imported characters that bend at the joints.
Reflections and bounced light taken from the real surroundings.
Two experimental projects running next to the render work. Both are switched off or separate for now.
Experimental: a redesigned interface with teal themes and cleaner panels lands in the main build piece by piece, behind a switch. Screenshots will appear here once it is switched on.
Experimental: an MCP server, a separate tool for now, lets an AI assistant such as Claude edit a project's animation file through more than 20 typed tools: keyframes, objects, poses, validation and undo. A live bridge into a running Nova session has landed too, switched off by default.
Not a Blender replacement. A focused tool for character animators.
Simple block-animation tools made character animation approachable for a generation of creators. Blender can render almost anything, and asks for a steep learning curve in return. Nova aims to be the bridge between them: an approachable workflow with a modern renderer, for blocky rigs today and imported 3D models as that work matures.
A short tour of Nova: the editor, the timeline, how a frame is built, and export. Every shot is captured from a Nova development build, then edited into an animated walkthrough. It shows the redesigned interface, which is still experimental.
Claude Code is the main engineering agent in Nova's codebase.
It works in the C++ editor code, the Direct3D 12 render passes and shaders, the animation system, and the builds and tests, and proves each change before it is merged. DreamZ sets the direction and makes every visual decision by eye.
Nova in active development
