Kim Lee works on visual effects for shows like Agents of Shield and The Blacklist, and builds custom props and sets for shows like The Knick. Combining a digital design process with physical fabrication gives him the most flexibility and creativity. In this interview, Kim discusses how this combo has factored into his unusual career path and his current projects. Along the way, he introduces his favorite software (3ds Max), shop tools (DEWALT), and sources of inspiration.
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Instructor’s Welcome Note:
– My name is Kim Lee. I do a myriad of things. Most recently, I’m doing 3D animation and I do that at a company called FuseFX in New York. I also do fabrication, specialty fabrication for custom props and sets. What am I working on at the moment? I’m working on a bunch of TV shows. Visual effects for a bunch of big TV shows that are out, stuff like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Blacklist, things of that nature, and a couple of new ones coming out this fall.
Also working on, on the side, working on a fabrication project with my brother, who owns a side company with me, creating very strange mechanism related to food is all I can say. Well, back when I was learning it, there were no schools teaching this stuff. There were very few published instructional material available for it.
I remember running around and having to try to find this CAD book about AutoCAD that happened to have a chapter about 3D Studio. I started on 3D Studio DOS way back in the day. So there was really not a lot of information. It was all self-taught, for the most part. Probably around the time when I started getting established, that’s when all the books started coming out. So I was like, “Damn. Just missed it.” Most of my material for learning didn’t come from the web.
It came from sitting with people who were also doing it, which led me to start the user group in New York for 3D studio. It started as a 3D studio user group, and then obviously, when 3ds Max came out, we changed it over to a Max user group, but the exact reason for not being able to find material to learn from, and to find– We basically had to find fellow birds of a feather, right? Kindred souls who were interested in the same thing.
So I had reached out at the time, I guess it was CompuServe or AOL, I mean, this was, wow, I’m really dating myself. We reached out there, and I found two other guys in the New York area who were working with the same program. I’m like, “Oh, this is amazing. I found other people.” And we were talking, and I was like, “There’s gotta be a user group to “go find out information from.” And there wasn’t. We looked and we looked, and we couldn’t find anything; and we had gotten together and said, “Well, what’s to stop us from starting one?” You know? So we just started a user group just to get community together and to try to find people to learn from.
That led to meeting a lot of people, getting my first job, meeting people from Autodesk, like Frank DeLise and that whole crew, who I became friends with and learned so much hanging out with them. We all would hang out together, and we would have Super Bowl parties at Frank’s house, and never watched the football game, but stopped to watch the commercials to see the CG in it, and, but we would sit there, and be making stuff and it was kind of a…
When I was learning, the best thing was it was a rivalry because, at the time, Frank had been the main demo guy at Autodesk, or I guess it was Kinetics at the time when we were learning this stuff. And he would show. Hey, look at this cool thing. And I can make a submarine with bubbles and whatever, all that. And we would watch, and be like, “Oh, that’s cool. Yeah.” Then you’d go home and like, “I know he clicked on something here.” You know, you just kind of learn from watching, from each other and a little bit of friendly rivalry kind of like, “I can make a better one than that. Let me do it.” You know, and just, we kind of pushed each other.
So, a lot of my learning, initially, was self-taught. Reading the manuals, trying stuff, just making things, making mistakes. Reading the forums on CompuServe at the time before there were all these websites and stuff. And then, learning from peers, and hanging out, and just because we loved what we were doing, and we were really interested in it, we would sit down and like, “Oh yeah, I got a way to do this.” And we would check it out and go improve on it. So, a lot of that.
Very little from books. Nothing from like videos on the w
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