Creating Ident Two: The Church.

For the second Ident I wanted to retain the main wedding couple, as they were to be the corporate characters throughout the campaign. Having used a wedding cake for the first Ident, I asked people what they thought of when I mentioned the word wedding, and church came out top, so that was what I decided to build next. Again, it was made up of simple shapes, but this time I wanted to employ a more photorealistic model, so sourced real materials including tiles, stained glass windows and a church door, which I made more realistic by adding the ‘bump’ effect, pushing the clock up to 450 to give the object a real 3D embossed feel. The UVW mapping was invaluable for creating the correct perspective of the object such as the tiles.

It was easier to merge the characters this time, and I had also gone back to the original characters and added all the correct materials to them, so the whole process was becoming smoother and quicker.

Again, moving the camera by manually setting keyframes made the camera more interesting and less unpredictable!

I also realised that the shows feature had been turned off on the lights, and although it wasn’t important in Ident 1, I needed to give the wedding characters weight as they were standing outside the church. After playing with the shadow, I added a low-key spot onto the couple and selected the ray-trace feature & didn’t think any more of it. That was until I came to render the sequence, and the computer ground to a halt! It took a lot of back tracking before I finally realised that the ray-trace was the problem, and after changing the shadow back to normal, everything started working smoothly again. Phew!

Again, I carefully chose a background that suited the piece, and a blue sky with fluffy white clouds seemed to perfectly encapsulate the ideal English wedding day.


Things learnt from Ident 2: Bump mapping of materials, UVW mapping of materials, Boolean for windows, shadow mapping and the dangers of ray-trace shadows!