This post outlines a workflow with Tailscale, a VPN tool, and Thinkbox Deadline for rendering.

The Genius of Meshes​

I recently stumbled upon a very cool FOSS tool called Tailscale. Tailscale is a secure and easy-to-use VPN that allows you to connect to a network remotely — like from an airplane or in my case, often from China.

Something specifically interesting about Tailscale is that it uses a mesh network topology, which means that every device on the network is connected to every other device. This allows for quick and reliable communication between devices, even if they are behind firewalls. On top of that, Tailscale gives you a pretty sweet user interface, making it easy to set up and authenticate with, certainly easier than opening up ports and forwarding stuff. Tailscale is built on top of WireGuard which is their cryptographic foundation for secure peer-to-peer connections. There's a bunch more that they do with smartly storing keys and how they exchange, but essentially, there's no single point of failure (or bottlenecking), and the scalability factor of this particular type of distributed mesh is huge too (but they let you select "exit nodes" where you can funnel traffic specifically if you still want stuff to go through a chosen node).

tldr: I made a Christmas card in Unreal Engine in 2023 that you can watch here on YouTube.

In December 2023, I was a relatively new addition to the team at Baked Studios and thought it might be nice to make everyone a Christmas card using Unreal Engine. I had been curious about the historic game engine and quickly rising DCC for some time. But when my favorite YouTuber covered it in a video, I had to give it a try.

Behind the Scenes​

Cookie Development in Maya​

This is an overview of how remote VFX workflows can be improved by adopting Suite Studios.

Introduction​

At the core of every VFX workflow is thoughtful consideration of who the users are. Typically this includes artists, TDs, coordinators, supervisors and producers. A good remote workflow, that does right by these users, needs the following qualities...

In order of usage frequency:

1. Arc 🎨 - A creative new take on the web browser
2. Thunderbird 🐦 - Lightweight, configurable email client - free and open-source from Mozilla
3. BitWarden 🔐 - Modern, cross-platform and open-source password/secrets manager
4. Bear 🐻 - Note taking and documentation writing markdown App
5. Zed 🔳 - Open source high performance GPU accelerated collaborative code editor
6. Suite 🚀 - Mounted cloud storage at lightning speeds
7. Parallels ‼️ - Local VMs and cross platform integrations on your mac
8. Signal 🛜 - WhatsApp substitute - letting me get away from meta in 2025
9. MASV 🛸 - Lightweight, well designed file share platform for sending massive files (slack integration ++)
10. Spacedrive 🪐 - A promising cross-platform file manager that packs a huge punch

Honorable mentions:

• Compressor 🗜️ - Apple’s Media Encoder - allowed me to leave adobe in 2024
• Pixelmator Pro 🖌️ - Photoshop/Illustrator replacement - also let me leave adobe in 2024
• ChatGPT 🤖 - LLM AI who’s lovely to talk to - but the app needs much more love
• DaVinci Resolve 🖲️ - Not new to most people - but this also allowed me to leave adobe in 2024 - deserves a mention just for that
• DaisyDisk 🌼 - Awesome graphical disk space utility for Mac (late to the game on sunburst diagrams)

Simple and fun way to access decades worth of techno dev from Apple and Pixar:

Export a model or animation out of Maya with the USD plugin. Can drag and drop into Apple’s “Reality Converter” if you’d like to tweak. And that’s it, you should have a file that’s openable in AR.

This post outlines a neat and exciting way to use a Tidbyt device in production for VFX.

I'm excited to share a cool integration I put together. Here's the documentation for creating a Tidbyt status monitor using Python and a strange mysterious language called Starlark. Tidbyts are these small, wall-powered displays that can be used to show information on your desk or anywhere else you want to keep track of cool stuff.

🤖Find the REPO here on GitHub🟪