CreativeCraft

One Windows window that hosts seven creative tools, with the page tabs along the bottom edge like DaVinci Resolve.

Two familiar ideas, combined. DaVinci Resolve puts editing, effects, colour and audio in one application as pages along the bottom, all sharing one project. Affinity puts one document behind several personas — Vector, Pixel, Layout — so the same design is edited from different angles. CreativeCraft does both in one window:

• FilmCraft and EffectCraft are open at the same time on the same project, so a cut and its motion graphics sit side by side instead of in two applications.
• PhotoCraft, VectorCraft and FigCraft are three personas over one shared design document, so a shape drawn in Vector is the same shape Layout sets type around and Pixel paints on.
• SoundCraft opens the audio of that same cut, and the local AI studio runs beside them rather than in a browser tab.

Nothing here is a wrapper or a mock-up: each tab runs the real application and its real engine, and the hand-offs move real frames and real documents between them.

First launch, Photo tab (Vector persona). A blank 1200×800 artboard: no sample design, no layers, and no shared timeline yet. The tab bar sits along the bottom edge, DaVinci-style.

Tab	App it hosts	What you can do there
Edit	FilmCraft	Import media, build a cut on the timeline, use the program monitor, markers and the Export screen.
Effects	EffectCraft	Node-based compositing, keyframes, OpenFX plug-ins and a render queue.
Photo	PhotoCraft + the shared design	Three personas on one document: Vector (paths, shapes, fills), Pixel (paint, erase, masks) and Layout (FigCraft frames, text, auto layout).
Audio	FilmCraft audio + SoundCraft	The same cut's audio: clips, mixer, and a hand-off to the sound editor.
3D	EffectCraft Advanced 3D	Placeholder. The panel exists, but this is not a working modeller yet.
Render	FilmCraft Export + EffectCraft queue	Export presets and background renders.
AI	Maestro	A local AI video, image and music studio, running in its own web view.

The apps are not reimplementations or screenshots: each tab runs the real application and its real engine. The shell only supplies the window, the theme and the hand-offs between them (a frame from Edit can become a photo layer, a design can become clips, and so on).

Credits. CreativeCraft is based on FilmCraft, EffectCraft, PhotoCraft, FigCraft, VectorCraft and SoundCraft by the ArtCraft team, bundled here as modified copies. It is an independent project: not made, sponsored or endorsed by the ArtCraft team, and it ships none of their logos or wordmark.

Version 0.1.0. Early, and honest about what it does not do yet.

First launch, Edit tab. An "Untitled" project with 0 items and no sequence. Nothing is loaded until you import media or create one.

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Run it (no installation, no Rust)

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. No installer, no Rust toolchain, nothing else to install; to remove CreativeCraft, delete the folder.

1. Open the latest release.
2. Download CreativeCraft-0.1.0-win64.zip.
3. Unzip it anywhere and double-click CreativeCraft.bat (or CreativeCraft.exe).

Windows will warn that the publisher is unknown, because the build is not code-signed. Choose More info → Run anyway.

If Windows reports a missing VCRUNTIME140.dll, install the free Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable (x64), then start CreativeCraft again.

Full release notes, requirements and limits are in the README.txt inside the ZIP.

Build it from source

You need Rust (stable, MSVC toolchain) and the Microsoft C++ build tools. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full setup and the project rules.

cd creativecraft\studio-shell
cargo run

The first build takes a long time and roughly 25 GB of disk in creativecraft\studio-shell\target. That folder is build scratch space, is ignored by git, and can be deleted at any time.

Run the shell's tests with:

cd creativecraft\studio-shell
cargo test

Project docs

Document	What it covers
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md	How one window hosts seven apps, the hand-offs between them, and the honest list of what is tightly coupled
CHANGELOG.md	What each release adds, changes and does not do
CONTRIBUTING.md	Building, testing, the rules that are easy to break by accident, and where to report problems
docs/SHOWCASE.md	A shot list for recording a demo that only shows what the app really does

Folder layout

CreativeCraft.bat          development launcher (runs the debug build)
creativecraft/
  studio-shell/            the window: tabs, hosting, menu bar  <-- start here
  effectcraft/             Effects app (OpenFX host, node graph)
  filmcraft/               Edit, Audio and Render
  photocraft/              Photo
  figcraft/                design tool, hosted inside Photo's link panel
  vectorcraft/             vector editor
  soundcraft/              sound tools
  solidcraft/              not hosted (different egui version)
  libs/                    shared crates used by the apps

What is verified

• The window opens on an empty project: blank canvas in Photo, no clips or sequences in Edit. Nothing is pre-filled.
• Every tab hosts the real application, not a mock-up.
• The Studio (Dark) theme is PhotoCraft's default.
• OpenFX renders on the CPU. ToneLab Chroma and Trioscope Raytracing Relight were confirmed with real frames (Trioscope at 1920×1080).
• Plug-ins run in a separate helper process, so a crashing plug-in cannot take the window down.
• studio-shell tests: 63 passing.

Known limits

• 3D is a placeholder. EffectCraft's Advanced 3D panels exist, but the 3D tab is not a working modeller yet.
• Red Giant (Magic Bullet, Universe), Boris FX, Topaz Video AI and the DaVinci Resolve Renderer do not render here.
  • Red Giant loads and describes its parameters, then refuses to render; it needs a GPU-memory render pipeline this build does not provide.
  • Boris FX is installed as the Adobe .aex edition; this host loads only OpenFX .ofx plug-ins.
  • Topaz and Resolve are built to run inside their own applications.
• Plug-ins that draw on-screen handles (masks, trackers, widgets) render the picture but do not show their handles.
• CPU plug-ins render one frame per call through a single helper process: correct, but slower than a built-in effect.
• The first launch scans installed OpenFX plug-ins and can take up to about 90 seconds on a machine with many of them. Later launches use a cache.

Licence and credits

The CreativeCraft shell (creativecraft/studio-shell/) is MIT licensed; see LICENSE.

CreativeCraft bundles modified copies of these MIT OR Apache-2.0 projects. Each one keeps its own LICENSE-MIT, LICENSE-APACHE, NOTICE and ATTRIBUTION.md, and those terms apply to that app's code:

Folder	Upstream
effectcraft/	github.com/storytold/effectcraft
filmcraft/	github.com/storytold/filmcraft
photocraft/	github.com/storytold/photocraft
figcraft/	github.com/storytold/figcraft
vectorcraft/	github.com/storytold/vectorcraft
soundcraft/	github.com/storytold/soundcraft
solidcraft/	github.com/tangency-labs/solidcraft
libs/	github.com/storytold/craft-libs

CreativeCraft is an independent project. It is not made, sponsored or endorsed by the ArtCraft Team, the SolidCraft contributors, Red Giant, Boris FX, Topaz Labs or Blackmagic Design. The ArtCraft logo folders (docs/brand/) are trademarks and are deliberately not published here.

☕ Support My Work

If you find this project useful, you can support me on Ko-fi:

See NOTICE for the full statement.