Toolsday: Workflow Wonders
Shortcuts, skyboxes, and stories — streamlined.
Every other Tuesday, I round up a few tools that are making my creative life easier, more interesting, or just plain more fun. Welcome to Toolsday — like Tuesday, but with fewer meetings and more shortcuts. This week’s theme is workflow wonders: three tools that take formerly tedious tasks and make them smoother, faster, or surprisingly delightful. If you’ve ever wanted to skip the menu-diving, background-building, or narrative-wrangling — these are for you.
1. FX Console Plugin for After Effects
The FX Console plugin by Video Copilot is one of those rare, practical tools that completely changes your workflow for the better. With a quick shortcut — Control + Spacebar on Mac — you can instantly search and apply your favorite effects without ever leaving the comp window. It’s fast, intuitive, and 100% free.
It’s become an invaluable part of my workflow. This is a perfect example of a creator running into a pain point and building the solution — then generously sharing it with the world. Huge thanks to Video Copilot for the ingenuity and the gift. More of this energy, please.
2. Skybox AI by Blockade Labs
Skybox AI is an incredibly fun and useful tool for generating 360° skyboxes using just a text prompt. Whether you're building 3D environments, prototyping game levels, or just playing with visual ideas, this tool lets you quickly create immersive skies, landscapes, and entire worlds.
It’s fast, easy to use, and perfect for experimenting with mood and atmosphere in your scenes. I've found it especially helpful when I need a quick background or want to visualize a space without modeling everything from scratch. Definitely one to bookmark if you work in 3D or immersive media.
3. Twine: Interactive Fiction Tool
Twine is a free, open-source tool for writing interactive fiction — think branching stories, text-based games, or nonlinear narratives. It’s incredibly beginner-friendly (no coding required), but also flexible enough to expand with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript if you want to go deeper.
I love how accessible it is. Whether you’re mapping out a complex narrative or just experimenting with storytelling in new ways, Twine makes it easy to prototype and play. It’s a gem of a tool — and the fact that it’s open source makes it even better.
Whatcha think?
That’s it for this week’s Toolsday! Have you used any of these tools before? Got a favorite resource you think I should check out? Feel free to hit reply or leave a comment — I'd love to hear what’s hanging in your tool belt.
Hugs and high fives,
H
Happy belated Toolsday! It's so good to see Video Copilot is still doing the digital Lord's work 🤓 I've also enjoyed using Blockade in the past in Blender and Unity because environment art is not my strong suit. I do have the bog standard concerns of whether or not that the LLM is trained on a lot of concept artists who could have used the work so I use it for my personal projects. And Twine sounds super intriguing! Thank you for the good word 🙏
I didn’t know about FX Console by Video Copilot—thanks! I’ve heard about Skybox AI but haven’t yet tried it… Digging these Toolsday posts!