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Bryan Howard VFX Artist, Engineer, Open Source Developer

Finally, a place to call home

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Bryan Howard
4 min read

Finally, a place to call home

Hi there! I’m Bryan, and after way too long of having my thoughts and projects scattered across the internet, I finally decided to build myself a proper website.

Who am I, anyway?

I’ve been working in visual effects for over 20 years now. Started at Toronto Film School and somehow ended up working on films like The Chronicles of Narnia, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and Netflix’s The Get Down. It’s been a wild ride through the entertainment industry, building tools and workflows that help bring impossible things to life on screen.

But these days, I’m just as excited about precision measurement tools and DIY CNC machines as I am about making digital explosions look real. Funny how careers evolve, right?

The scattered digital life problem

Here’s the thing - I’ve got content everywhere. My YouTube channel is mostly PrintNC builds and CNC tutorials. My GitHub has Python tools I’ve built over the years, including some precision measurement stuff that even got featured on Hackaday. I’m active in the PrintNC Discord community, sharing techniques for measuring surface flatness with webcams and lasers (because who doesn’t love achieving micron-level precision with a $15 webcam?).

The problem is, none of these platforms are great for the kind of long-form writing I want to do. YouTube is perfect for showing how to build something, but terrible for explaining the theory behind why it works. GitHub is great for code, but not so much for the stories about why I built something or what I learned along the way.

What this place is for

I want this website to be where I can really dig into topics I care about. Things like:

  • CNC and precision measurement - I’ve spent way too much time figuring out how to measure things accurately, and I’d love to share what I’ve learned
  • VFX pipeline tools - Two decades of building Python tools for film production has taught me a few things about making complex workflows manageable
  • Open source projects - I believe in sharing knowledge, and I want to write about the projects I’m working on and why they matter
  • The intersection of entertainment and engineering - It’s fascinating how skills from one world apply to the other

No marketing nonsense here

This isn’t going to be one of those blogs full of “10 Amazing Tips” or “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next.” I’m just going to write about stuff I find interesting and hope you do too. If you’re into PrintNC machines, Python automation, or just curious about how visual effects get made, you might find something useful here.

I’ve always believed that the best way to truly understand something is to try to explain it to someone else. So really, this site is as much for me as it is for you - a place to organize my thoughts and share what I’ve learned.

What’s coming

I’ve got a backlog of topics I want to write about:

  • Laser-level-webcam project - The complete story behind that precision measurement system that got featured on Hackaday
  • PrintNC adventures - Build experiences, modifications, and lessons learned from the open-source CNC journey
  • DIY Ball Bar and other random projects - Those weird engineering tangents I dive into on YouTube that deserve deeper explanations
  • PyFlowGraph development - Building node-based visual programming tools and why I think they matter
  • Python tools for VFX - Two decades of pipeline tools that you might find useful in completely different fields
  • Democratizing precision tools - How affordable tech can achieve professional results (spoiler: it doesn’t have to cost a fortune)

Thanks for stopping by. I hope you find something interesting to read, and if you have questions or want to share your own experiences, don’t hesitate to reach out through any of my social links.

Now, let me go figure out what to write about first…