It started pretty organically. Early on, I was rigging robots and experimenting with Blender’s Python API through lots of small prototypes and little experiments. When I began my Doctor of Design, I unified all of those ideas into a single interactive robotics environment. I emphasize interactive because that’s where Blender really changed the game.

Animaquina has been used across multiple research labs, but it’s also been used on real built projects. The Dancing Columns project with Joseph Choma, exhibited at the Phase Gallery in Miami Beach, was entirely fabricated with Animaquina. More recently, a six-meter-tall column by artist Edouard Duval-Carrié, currently on display at the Venice Biennale, was produced using it for both the robotic 3D printing and robotic milling.

We spoke to Luis Pacheco about the story behind Animaquina, from early experiments rigging robots with Blender’s Python API to its real-world applications and how Geometry Nodes became the technical core of the project.