With Clarence Keith @ Nalana: What If You Could Speak 3D Into Existence?

Toy Story took five years to make. Clarence Keith thinks the modeling, rigging, and animating behind work like that should take a fraction of the time — so he's building Nalana, an AI-native 3D design software he pitches as “Cursor for Blender.”

On this episode of 18VC, we sit down with Clarence Keith — Blender veteran, former Honda project designer, teacher of 100+ students, and USC Iovine and Young Academy transfer — to unpack how a lifetime of making masks, shoes, and music videos led to a speech-to-3D platform that industrial designers are already piloting.

Highlights

• The moment he realized LLMs are great at Python, Blender has a Python console — and nobody had connected the dots for 3D
• Why he refuses to build a plugin, and how owning the platform becomes a data moat that's “profitable and defensible”
• Speech-to-3D: why talking, gesturing, and sketching — not clicking panels — is how creation will work
• The “be the 2%” mindset: how he transferred twice (Emory → USC Marshall → USC IYA) without ever looking at acceptance rates
• Why architects didn't bite, industrial designers did — and what a vacuum teaches you about go-to-market
• “Designing the wait”: the UX lesson from watching pilot users ask “is it working?” five seconds after a prompt