Thought Fed: Exclusive Interview with Brian Knapp

Meet Brian Knapp, a visionary 3D artist and native of Grand Rapids, MI. Brian’s YouTube channel, Thought Fed, features 3D animated videos speculating about the future of science and technology. We discuss creating scientific visualizations, 3D software, and of course, AI.

Brian started his career as an office furniture designer for Haworth, and later for Steelcase. In 2000, he started Externa CGI, an award-winning 3D animation studio.

Thought Fed Trailer

Toolfarm: Hi Brian. Thanks for talking with us today.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work? I know you started your career as a furniture designer with Haworth and Steelcase…

Brian Knapp: Yes, I started my post-schooling career as an industrial designer. About 3 years into that I realized I liked telling product stories much more than designing the products, so I started Externa to do just that.

Thought Fed, Fed by Thought, is a channel for animations/films we make about various futuristic concepts.

TF: I’ll bet it’s a lot more interesting! When I was in school, one of my favorite classes was Futuristics where we talked about topics that you discuss in your videos at Thought Fed.

In the first video, In-space Propulsion for Space Exploration, you dive pretty deeply into concepts like ion drives and solar sails. Are you doing the research for Thought Fed yourself?

BK: We did all the research. I read a lot of papers and articles and such. We kicked around a few ideas and that one was the one that felt the most appropriate. There are not really any environments to worry about so we could spend more time on the subject and really make that shine.

The second video will be about how AI Robots will be integrated into society. I set the bar WAY too high with this last one. LOL.

TF: How did you use 3ds Max and V-Ray to achieve your goals? Can you share any of the specific techniques you used in 3ds Max and V-Ray to create the video?

BK: Max of course is an animation workhorse and a fantastic host for plugins.  I have been using Max since it was in DOS only. So the familiarity with Max helps. I’ve been using it for around 25 years, or a little more, I think. V-Ray, of course, is key to realism. The lighting and materials in V-Ray are excellent. The engine is consistently reliable and fast. 

We used Ty-flow and Phoenix FD as well. But Max’s m-particles and P-flow are also excellent tools that ship with Max. We used P-flow for some of the atomic-level animations.  All the gasses, clouds, and flames were done with Phoenix FD. The solar sail was done with TyFlow and looks so sick.

From a production POV, we researched and wrote the film before we got into animation.  While I was researching and writing the rest of the team was working on the engines and base ship.

“V-Ray, of course, is key to realism. The lighting and materials in V-Ray are excellent. The engine is consistently reliable and fast.“

– Brian Knapp

TF: It’s really impressive! How did you handle the complexity of the scene?

BK: The first thing was to not render any planets or space. All of the planets were done with Video Copilot’s Orb plugin and I used various techniques in After Effects to create the space gas clouds and star field.  I used a couple of images from NASA for the Milky Way.  And then, of course, you have to use Video Copilot’s Optical Flares. So, I used those for the larger stars and any lens flares.

Then we broke up each scene between the team. One animator would do the solar sail scene, someone else would work on hydrogen collection, and so on.  

TF: Are any unique considerations given to lighting a space scene?

BK: You’d think the lighting in space would be really easy, just the sun, right?  There’s nothing to bounce light off of in space anyway. But, that doesn’t actually work. So, yes, we needed to consider how it looked overall. Mostly it’s one big directional light as your main key light, and then we used a V-Ray dome light as a fill light so we could still see the shadow side of the ships.

TF: These videos are beautiful and 4K. What were some of the challenges you faced in rendering the video? How do you store such large renders?

BK: 4k is huge like that, right? So huge. Big-ass hard drives are the key. We have a computer on our network that we call Frame Dump. So the render farm puts everything there, and then it gets transferred over to my MacBookPro M1 for compositing. 

Still… loads of frames. For each rendered frame, it is actually 6 to 20 or so frames. I love to utilize render elements. So, we have the beauty pass, but then also reflection, refraction, specular, lighting, shadow, SSS if present, and alphas for various elements. A while back, one of the team wrote a nice script to iso out geometry for alphas. So, really just as much magic happened in After Effects.

TF: Do you have any techniques to optimize the scene to improve render times?

BK: There are lots of ways. One was having the environment just be open black space. That helped a lot, along with fiddling with AA settings. It’s okay to have a little noise in there because you can remove it in AE. And then, we put new film grain over that. CG grain isn’t cool, but film grain is. We were also smart about the polygon density of the ships.

TF: Was this project a collaborative effort? How did you manage assets and files for sharing?

BK: It was. Five of us worked on it. One member did the initial ship; everyone chipped in on modeling the various engines. Then those were put on a shared drive on the network. The team set up the animations. I did most of the cinematography on the shots but not all. I did the modeling and animation of the “host” character myself. We used KitBash3D assets and Chaos browser assets for the title sequence. I did all the compositing/AE work myself.

TF: What were some of the benefits of using 3ds Max and V-Ray for this project?

BK: Max is a workhorse with a deep set of built-in tools and a load of plugins.  V-Ray of course is a fantastic render engine with so many resources out there for the learning. It renders fast and Chaos Group’s customer service is really great.

TF: So, how about the soundtrack and voiceover?

BK: We used AI for the voice-over. This was done with zero budget so instead of paying thousands for professional voice-over, we thought we’d try out ElevenLabs.io and it worked really well, saved lots of time and money, and sounds good.

We also did all sound design in-house. I composed the music and did all the SFXs.

TF: That’s awesome. Speaking of AI, how do you see it affecting 3D artists?

BK: AI is already making changes. Blender has a Midjourney plugin already that is pretty great. That’s part of why I want to start using Blender more. 

AI is going to bring some cool stuff to VFX and also some terrible things. Look at Wonder Dynamics. You can just upload a phone video and it will track it, mo-cap the humans, and replace them with CG characters. It’s not perfect yet, but it is wicked good for where we are now.

I’m really waiting for AI to get into simulations. Fluid sims and physics sims can be super finicky right now. Change one little setting and the results can change drastically. So, I can see AI getting into that. Being able to type in “make the scale of the cloud 10% smaller” or “increase the thrust of the jet by 30%” would be really useful. I’m sure we’ll get there shortly.  

There is no escaping AI. We can’t fight it, we have to get in front of it and utilize it. It is similar to the 90s when “desktop publishing” was a thing. We still need to use our creative brains to solve problems.  A lot of what AI is really good for is doing boring and tedious things, like rotoscoping. AI can allow us to spend more of our time on the creative parts of the process. Or, AI can just do everything and do a kind of meh job of it that most people will probably accept. That’s the scary part. And, now that we have multimodal AI surfacing, we are going to see more and more of it being used and pushed at us on the daily.

TF: What do you hope to achieve with the Thought Fed in the future?

BK: We hope to release a second film in the future. This is a side project so it doesn’t always get the time. I’m in the process of writing the second film and some pre-production has been done. I hope to continue to release science and futurism films on the channel over time.

TF: That’s fantastic. What advice would you give to other 3D artists who are interested in creating scientific visualizations?

BK: Take your time, plan ahead, and do your research.  Use lots of references from real-world examples.

TF: Would you recommend 3ds Max and V-Ray to other 3D artists who are interested in creating scientific visualizations?

BK: For sure. V-Ray is such a good render engine. [There is] so much support out there to help, as well. Same, for Max. I’m very used to the UI. 

TF: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us about your work and Thought Feed, Brian.

In Depth: Why Should I Use V-Ray?

In summary, V-Ray is a powerful 3D rendering system built for designers, architects, and jack-of-all-trades. To be sure, click to learn about how artists use V-Ray. To emphasize, there are many examples and trial versions for every field!

Why Should I use V-Ray?