I've been a photons-on-glass filmmaker for over ten years, and I've been developing ArtCraft for myself, my friends, and my colleagues.

All of my film school friends have a lot of ambition, but the production pyramid doesn't allow individual talent to shine easily. 10,000 students go to film school, yet only a handful get to helm projects they want with full autonomy - and almost never at the blockbuster budget levels that would afford the creative vision they want. There's a lot of nepotism, too.

AI is the personal computer moment for film. The DAW.

One of my friends has done rotoscoping with live actors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tii9uF0nAx4

The Corridor folks show off a lot of creativity with this tech:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9LX9HSQkWo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSRrSO7QhXY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq5JaG53dho

We've been making silly shorts ourselves:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqoCWdOwr2U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4NFXGMuwpY

The secret is that a lot of studios have been using AI for well over a year now. You just don't notice it, and they won't ever tell you because of the stigma. It's the "bad toupee fallacy" - you'll only notice it when it's bad, and they'll never tell you otherwise.

Comfy is neat, but I work with folks that don't intuit node graphs and that either don't have graphics cards with adequate VRAM, or that can't manage Python dependencies. The foundation models are all pretty competitive, and they're becoming increasingly controllable - and that's the big thing - control. So I've been working on the UI/UX control layer.

ArtCraft has 2D and 3D control surfaces, where the 3D portion can be used as a strong and intuitive ControlNet for "Image-to-Image" (I2I) and "Image-to-Video" (I2V) workflows. It's almost like a WYSIWYG, and I'm confident that this is the direction the tech will evolve for creative professionals rather than text-centric prompting.

I've been frustrated with tools like Gimp and Blender for a while. I'm no UX/UI maestro, but I've never enjoyed complicated tools - especially complicated OSS tools. Commercial-grade tools are better. Figma is sublime. An IDE for creatives should be simple, magical, and powerful.

ArtCraft lets you drag and drop from a variety of creative canvases and an asset drawer easily. It's fast and intuitive. Bouncing between text-to-image for quick prototyping, image editing, 3d gen, to 3d compositing is fluid. It feels like "crafting" rather than prompting or node graph wizardry.

ArtCraft, being a desktop app, lets us log you into 3rd party compute providers. I'm a big proponent of using and integrating the models you subscribe to wherever you have them. This has let us integrate WorldLabs' Marble Gaussian Splats, for instance, and nobody else has done that. My plan is to add every provider over time, including generic API key-based compute providers like FAL and Replicate. I don't care if you pay for ArtCraft - I just want it to be useful.

Two disclaimers:

ArtCraft is "fair source" - I'd like to go the Cockroach DB route and eventually get funding, but keep the tool itself 100% source available for people to build and run for themselves. Obsidian, but with source code. If we got big, I'd spend a lot of time making movies.

Right now ArtCraft is tied to a lightweight cloud service - I don't like this. It was a choice so I could reuse an old project and go fast, but I intend for this to work fully offline soon. All server code is in the monorepo, so you can run everything yourself. In the fullness of time, I do envision a portable OSS cloud for various AI tools to read/write to like a Github for assets, but that's just a distant idea right now.

I've written about roadmap in the repo: I'd like to develop integrations for every compute provider, rewrite the frontend UI/UX in Bevy for a fully native client, and integrate local models too.

Yifi: A macOS menu bar app that monitors your network health in real time

Show HN: How to challenge technical assumptions before they cost you

Show HN: 3D and World Models for Consistent AI Filmmaking

The Solution to Prompt Injection: Mapping SSL/TLS Trust Architecture onto LLMs [pdf]

Don't give away to the gradient descent

Shell and Skills and Compaction: Tips for long-running agents that do real work

Anna's Archive 'Releases' Spotify Tracks, Despite Legal Pushback

Terms of Service

Healthcare Jobs Have Become the Engine of America's Labor Market

Benchmarking 8 remote browser providers with 250 concurrent AI agents

A language model made in Latin America, for Latin America

SpaceX Makes a Pivot, Wants to Build on the Moon Instead

Building Chess in about 350 lines of Clojure

Show HN: Claude Remote

I found a way to reduce context redundancy 30-60%

Show HN: IQT – Why space feels panoramic and time feels fleeting

Mistral's revenues soar over $400M as Europe seeks AI independence

Ask HN: What resources do you use to fill specialized positions?

Show HN: Double blind entropy using Drand for verifiably fair randomness

US payment processor BridgePay outage lasts a week due to ransomware attack

How Do You Patch This? Red Team Down

Hyperliquidity Provider (HLP)

We Bought the First Fake Toyota from China [video]

Apple reportedly pushing back Gemini-powered Siri features beyond iOS 26.4

The Problem with LLMs

The Dark Side of This AI Startup's Super-Fast Growth

Deriving the Fisher Equation from 2D Fluid Dynamics (SSRN)

Mathematicians Are Putting A.I. To the Test

Russia blocks Meta's WhatsApp messaging service

Without XSLT, user is prompted to download RSS in browser [video]

Show HN: Production-Ready NestJS Back End (Multi-Tenancy, Event-Driven)