Miquel Campos, developer of mGear, the open-source rigging framework for Maya, created a new tool to help animators, filmmakers, and artists track project progress.
There are many tools out there focused on team production tracking. While those tools have enormous benefits for teams, they likely won’t offer much to smaller projects or even to a one-person project. Enter GrowFrame, from the mind of mGear’s Miquel Campos. GrowFrame offers a way to celebrate the slow, handmade craft that can take months or years: the passion project.
“GrowFrame is a desktop app I built to document the daily work of long creative projects.” – Miquel Campos
Campos made GrowFrame to track progress on an animated short he’s been working on, spanning several years. “After using it for a while, I realized other artists might need the same thing. So I turned it into a product.”
A Kanban-Style Way to Mark Progress
The idea is simple. You drop your daily work into GrowFrame — That could be a frame, a render, an animation test, or a photo of a drawing or a sculpture — and it builds a visual timeline you can scroll back through to see months or years of progress at a glance.
Seeing the work pile up turns out to be a real motivator, which is the hardest thing to feel during a long project. And when you want to share, a few clicks turn any stretch of work into a reel across several social formats at once — so instead of spending hours making promotional content, you get that time back for the actual work.
Campos says that GrowFrame is built around a clear stance to celebrate human-made art.
“I’m not against AI as a technology, but GrowFrame is for the slow, hand-made work that takes humans months and years — work I think is more valuable, not less, in a moment when feeds are flooded with images made in seconds.”
Miquel Campos
Campos notes that GrowFrame is local-first: no cloud, no monthly subscription, no telemetry beyond license activation. Just a permanent license, like software used to be.
There is also an educational use case — it fits the multi-year journey of art and animation students surprisingly well, and a few schools have already started using it during the beta.
Campos also notes that GrowFrame is a one-person project — built, shipped, and run by me from a small studio here in Tokyo (mcsGear GK).
Learn More About GrowFrame
GrowFrame is live now at https://growframe.app — €35; an educational discount is also available for schools. Learn more about GrowFrame here.
