Phase 1 / May 2026
Forged on Thresholds, built so other VFX teams can use them. 20+ years of supervision, the pipeline I always wanted on a real show, finally shipping. AI closed the gap between knowing exactly how this should work and writing the code, without me pretending to be a pipeline TD.
From script to shot
One shared data pipeline. A bid becomes a live production plan, no re-typing, no glue scripts between tools.
Over the last years I've shifted focus from shot work to workflow optimization and pipeline development; the tools, the workflows, the UX a VFX team actually needs. Claude Code and AI made it possible to build all of it. Before, the gap between “I know exactly how this should work” and “I can ship it as production software” was a five-person engineering team. Now it fits inside one supervisor's head and a weekend of work.
My strength
Workflow analysis, workflow optimisation, pipeline design. Twenty years on the floor, as a VFX & CG Supervisor and former 3D Generalist, spent watching exactly where pipelines hurt, where producers struggle, where clients lose patience. I know what a CG department needs, what a VFX department needs, what's important and what isn't.
What I'm not
I'm not trying to replace pipeline TDs or production engineers. I don't have their coding background. What I have is the supervisor's view of where the workflow actually breaks, and now, thanks to Claude Code, the ability to prototype and ship the fix without waiting for engineering bandwidth that never comes.
The result
Three tools, built by the person who uses them, refined by the producer who depends on them. PXLbid -> PXLflow -> PXLtools, end-to-end, one data contract. Not a product looking for a market, the pipeline I always wanted, now hardened enough to drop into someone else's show.
AI agents trained as a Producer and a VFX Supervisor. They read the script the way I would.
Drop a script in, PDF, DOCX or TXT. An AI pass reads it the way a VFX supervisor would and hands back a structured breakdown of sequences, shots and assets, each one graded. You review and correct every line. Then it prices the work and lays out a broad schedule, so you know what the show costs and roughly how long it runs before you call the client back.
How it works
is simple as 1-2-3
The first pass returns a draft breakdown: sequences, shots, and every asset the script needs, each carrying a complexity grade. Enough to know whether you are looking at a 50-shot commercial or a 400-shot feature.
Nothing is taken on trust. Every row opens in a detail drawer, so you rename it, re-grade it, move it to another sequence, or drop it. Your corrections are kept as rules the agent applies on the next run.
Run a second pass when the first breakdown is too coarse. It subdivides wide shots into workable ones and tags the departments each asset passes through, model, texture, lookdev, rig, CFX and the rest. Pick the scope, the whole script, one sequence, one shot, one asset, or every asset of a type, and the intensity: light, medium or deep.
Skip it when one shot per scene is already enough to bid against. You can always reload the breakdown and run it later.
A line-item bid you edit as you read it. Every shot and asset is priced by discipline through an effort baseline, a complexity tier, and a seniority multiplier, all of them yours to tune in Rates & effort. Re-grade a line or drop it and the whole quote recomputes live, through overhead, contingency and margin, down to cost, man-days and a best-to-worst range.
A warnings tab collects everything the agent was unsure about, and every number that may not mean what it looks like. Read that before you export: a summary quote or a detailed bid for the client, an internal cost report you keep, the whole waterfall as an Excel workbook, or the canonical breakdown JSON that PXLflow reads.
From the same breakdown, a Gantt lays out calendar days by discipline. Dependencies drive the order, and the team size you set per department compresses the lanes, so two artists on one lane halve it. Re-grade a shot in the breakdown and the schedule moves with it.
That is deliberately where PXLbid stops. Putting the work on named artists, with their own rates, calendars and capabilities, is PXLflow's job. This is the pre-production estimate, not the plan.
Your numbers, not ours
The shipped baselines are placeholders, structurally right and financially fictional, and the app says so on the bid until you change them. Quick Tune asks five plain questions in hours, how long one hero character takes, one environment, one vehicle, one FX setup, animation on a five-second single-character shot, and sets all sixty-eight baselines in proportion. Underneath sits the per-row editor when you want to move one discipline on its own.
One blended day rate, five complexity tiers, three seniority levels, and your own overhead, contingency and margin. Every field explains itself on hover, with a worked example using the values you actually typed.
PXLbid runs on your own Anthropic API key, not mine. You pay Anthropic directly, at cost, and I hold no credits, no quota and no cap over you. Your script is opened and read in your browser, and it is never saved anywhere, which is why a second pass asks for the file again.
PXLbid + PXLflow
Where PXLbid stops, PXLflow picks up. Export the breakdown and PXLflow fills the production from it in a single import: every sequence, shot and asset, plus a task for each department Pass 2 tagged. Export the schedule and the start and due dates land on the matching shots. Nobody re-types anything.
PXLbid is built for PXLflow, and ftrack and ShotGrid export is on the roadmap.
PXLbid is taking on beta testers now. Access is granted per person, so if you want in, send an email and tell me a little about yourself: who you are, what you do, and the company you work for. That context is what makes the feedback useful, and it is what the numbers get tested against.
The tracker you'd build if you'd actually sat in dailies for over twenty years.
Took inspiration from ShotGrid and ftrack for the review side. From Notion and Monday for the planning side. Threw out everything that felt like it was built by someone who'd never sat in a dailies room. What's left is the tracker I always wanted.
I use it daily as the supervisor. My producer uses it daily as the producer. Every feature in there got fought for in a real review, hardened by a real schedule, killed if it didn't earn its place. No one's writing tickets from a roadmap they imagined.
Tasks know what they depend on. Move a deadline, the schedule reflows. Approve a concept, the downstream modeling task wakes up. And the plan does not start from a blank page: PXLbid's bid and schedule ingest natively, so the production opens already laid out, ready to assign.
Per-asset notes, versioned submissions, annotated frames, daily review sessions. Open any version straight into PXLrv, the built-in review player, and the notes round-trip back to the same sheet. The dailies room conversation becomes a permanent record without anyone having to write the minutes.
Electron desktop app. Google Sheets and Drive backend. Client-side OAuth. No server to maintain, no SaaS lock-in, no monthly bill that scales with seats. Mac and Windows installers, auto-update via Cloudflare R2.
Built in, not bolted on
PXLrv is a PXLsuite-branded build of OpenRV (Apache 2.0): full-quality playback, color management, frame-accurate scrubbing. It does the job studios pay a commercial RV review-player license for, with nothing to pay per seat.
Open any version from PXLflow and it loads in PXLrv, with the PXLflow notes panel living inside the player. Read the shot's notes, add new ones, and they write straight back to the same sheet. One backend, one data contract, no exporting and re-importing.
Independent shippables, sharing a brand, conventions, and a tech philosophy. Each one solves a real production problem on its own. The pipeline emerges when you stack them.
AI-driven VFX script breakdown and bidding. Weeks of script analysis, done in minutes.
VFX production tracker. The best of ShotGrid, ftrack, and Notion-style planning, built by people on the floor. Tracks shots, versions, tasks, dependencies, and approval status — the actual viewing happens in PXLrv.
Production Python toolkit for Maya, Nuke, and Unreal.
Custom made tools for the most used DCCs, developed to solve everyday artist's struggle.
Every tools' development comes from a real production need on the floor. Each one fixes something the DCC should have done out of the box.
Tested on Maya 2025 (PySide6), Arnold/MtoA 5.4.2.1, Nuke 15 (PySide2) and Unreal Engine 5.6, with versioned releases, a proper installer, and a shared dark UI. Each tile opens to the longer story.
The whole suite, or just one
Take everything in one click, or only the tool you came for — the download is
identical either way. One file, INSTALL.py, dragged into Maya: it installs
the toolkit and builds your shelf. Your licence decides which tools open, and you can switch
the rest on from inside the tool the day you need them.
They keep themselves current
Every tool checks for a new version when it launches and updates in one click — code and turntable assets together. No re-downloading, no zip to hunt for, no wondering whether you are on the current build.
All eight are free
Every tool is free and stays on your licence for good. Nothing expires, and nothing asks you for a card later. Claim them once and the updates keep arriving on their own.
The natural evolution of the turntable scene I released on Gumroad two years ago, downloaded over 1,500 times by artists worldwide and still going.
Now wrapped in a full easy-to-use UI on both Maya and Nuke, end-to-end.
Production-grade quality at a glance.
In Maya: import an asset, load the tool and run an easy-to-follow setup.
You end up with a production-grade turntable in the viewport, with Macbeth chart, reference balls, six perfectly balanced HDRIs (plus 2 free slots for your own HDRI). Render layers come pre-configured with embedded AOVs and shader.
In Nuke: the Maya export drops in cleanly.
The Nuke side handles asset name, side reference, background colour, and output whatever passes you want: colour, beauty, wireframe, all driven by a compact UI and because one render layer (from Maya) contains all the AOVs needed.
Build a client-ready turntable for any assets in a few minutes, not hours/days.
One tool, across two DCCs.
One seamless workflow, hardened on real client work, and the foundation of every other PXLtool that grew around it.
Scan a vendor texture library, build hundreds of PBR materials in your naming convention, in one click.
Get it free
Stable
Give every material in your library a real preview, rendered on your own model, in your own lighting.
A material library is only browsable if you can see what each material looks like. Most packs ship a flat tile of the texture, or a product gallery whose images carry no names, leaving you to match a picture to a filename by eye.
This asks Painter itself. It applies each material to whatever you have loaded, waits for the viewport to settle, and saves the render named after the material, so the result is correct by construction and never needs mapping. It handles Painter smart materials and Substance materials, walks subfolders and mirrors them into the output, and skips anything already rendered so a long run can be stopped and resumed.
Because it captures your viewport as you set it up, the look is yours: your model, your environment, your camera. Build the shot once and a whole library renders in that style.
GLB import and export with the right twist. Textures extracted, PBR materials built, asset centred, all on one click.
Available for free on the store
A complete, robust batch renamer. Simple where it should be simple, deep where production demands it.
Available for free on the store
Generate dozens of render layers from selection, auto-named from your group and object hierarchy.
Available for free on the store
Bulk-export a master model split into hundreds of pieces, each as its own OBJ, in one click.
Available for free on the store
Pack dozens to hundreds of renders into a single compact contact sheet, organised by lighting, expression, or asset.
Available for free on the store
Batch-set the colour space on selected Read/Write nodes — pick the space, tick Read/Write, apply.
Available for free on the store
Prototype
The first prototype of Claude integrated directly inside Maya. Drive repetitive tasks by prompt.
An early-stage AI agent integration that lives inside Maya. Ask it to do the boring repetitive thing, renaming, layouting, filing, simple cleanup, and it does it. Preliminary, but already productive on real shots.
The longer-term goal is a Maya-native co-pilot that understands the scene the way a TD does, not just a generic LLM with a viewport.
Prototype
Turn a script into a Maya Sequencer build, sequences, shots, frame ranges, ready to previs.
Read guide
Prototype
Prototype
Send Maya transforms to Unreal/MU — writes an FBX plus a .pxlbridge.json sidecar for the engine side.
Read guide
Prototype
Scene QC for Maya. Check a scene against your own naming convention and hierarchy, then fix what it finds, behind a preview and one undo.
Read guide
Prototype
Maya Bridge + Windows Sync. The Lightcraft Jetset round trip, which ships for Blender and Unreal but not Maya. An independent tool, not affiliated with Lightcraft.
Read guide
Prototype
Project Manager for Maya. Builds the production's folder tree from your own convention file, sets the Maya project at the department, and names your file for you when you save.
Read guide
Every asset I own, one search away.
The same idea as the rest of PXLsuite, applied to assets: one source, nothing re-typed, nothing hunted for. Over the years I bought and downloaded a lot of models, textures and HDRIs, spread across drives and download folders. PXLlibrary is my private library that puts all of it under one source on my NAS, browsable in one page: 43 model packs, 8,687 textures, 1,567 Substance materials, 234 HDRI skies and 18 alpha and brush packs. It is not for sale; it is one more piece of an ecosystem that keeps growing around the same principle.
Models, textures, Substance materials, HDRIs, alphas and brushes, from more than a dozen vendors and years of purchases, now live in one place on my NAS. Nothing is scattered across drives any more, and nothing depends on remembering which download folder a pack ended up in.
One search box across every collection, and filters by vendor, format, resolution and kit. Models and textures share one tag vocabulary, so a filter means the same thing on a model pack as it does on a texture library.
Copy a pack's folder path and point Maya or Nuke straight at it. The files never leave the NAS, so finding an asset and using it is one step instead of five. I open it off the NAS for speed, or online behind the PXLflow sign-in when I am away from the studio, where files download instead.
The next step is AI tagging on import, so a search for "red box" finds every red box, even when nobody named it that way.
A bid built in PXLbid opens in PXLflow already laid out, no re-typing and no glue scripts, because both tools read and write one shared data pipeline and run the same costing math, so the quote and the schedule never disagree. PXLtools speaks the same data on the DCC side. And the same dark editorial UI carries across every surface, web and DCC, because production teams shouldn't have to learn three visual languages to ship one shot.
One data pipeline
Bid to delivery
PXLbid to PXLflow to PXLtools, end to end. A bid opens in the tracker already laid out, no re-typing and no per-tool formats to reconcile. Both tools run the same costing math, so the quote and the schedule always agree. The producer's Excel export round-trips back in.
Shared visual language
Dark editorial UI
Same palette, same type rhythm, same component library across every tool in the family. PySide6 in Maya, PySide2 in Nuke, React 19 on the web, all reading from one design system.
Production standard
Ready to hand off
Built and hardened on real client work, versioned and documented, with a proper install for every tool. Not throwaway scripting. Any TD can pick these up and own them on day one.
VFX & CG Supervisor for over twenty years. Former 3D Generalist. Now also a pipeline-optimization consultant: studios that have outgrown their workflow bring me in to look at it the way I'd look at my own.
PXLsuite is the practical answer to a problem most VFX teams run into eventually. The pipeline grows organically, every project bends it a little, and after enough years the workflow no longer fits the way the team actually thinks. The pre-made tools made certain assumptions a decade ago and never revisited them. The team has the experience to fix it but not the engineering bandwidth.
That gap is what changed for me with Claude Code and modern AI. The same supervisor who knows exactly where a tracker should hurt now also has the ability to build the fix in a weekend, harden it on real client work, and ship it as production software. PXLsuite is the proof. Three tools, built by the person who uses them.
If your studio's pipeline used to fit and now doesn't anymore, that's usually a workflow problem dressed up as a tools problem. I look at pipelines the way I look at my own; 20+ years of supervision behind the audit and the ability to build the fix, not just write the slide deck. The door is open.