What's growing in these surreal TV idents?

Creative production and post-production house Triada Studio was given free reign to create idents to rebrand the Armenian television channel, Shoghakat TV. So far Triada has completed two of the four idents. "There were no time limits and the whole project, from idea, style frames and storyboards to shooting and postproduction, was up to us," says CEO Ara Aghamyan." Of course, this is the best way of working for us, but unfortunately these kinds of projects are extremely rare."

"Shoghakat TV's old idents were created by us some nine years ago and they were pretty fresh and innovative at that time. In each ident we had used one of the four elements: water, fire, earth and air. In new idents, we decided to extend the idea and instead of directly showing the elements, we represented them in a more metaphorical way."

For the production, the studio changed its lighting pipeline from V-Ray to Arnold. "Arnold is an amazing piece of software," says Ara. "You can render billions of polys, heavy displacement and Global Illumination in one go, without thinking about optimisation, Global Illumination flickering, caching and so on. Also the look-development process is quite fast and interactive with Arnold.

"Growing the tree was the most challenging task we've encountered so far during the production. For that we used a 3ds Max plug-in called GrowFX. We built and animated the tree with GrowFX, then we transferred alembic caches from 3ds Max to Maya using an Alembic plug-in for 3ds Max from Exocortex."

This article originally appeared in 3D World issue 176.

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