OpenText Ident rebrand 2025

The team and I had been tasked with elevating the standard sonic ident animation we use to close out videos. The previous Ident had been outsourced for a very large sum of money to an agency, so the opportunity to bring this animation back in-house was a great chance to get a win under out belts!

The Process

This Project went through many many many rounds of revisions and I am only showing you the portions I worked on. This was a large team effort that involved many people bouncing ideas off one another and iterating through rolling feedback! Below, I'll share a collection of renders from other ideas I had worked through.

Before even cracking open Blender I began by working through the clean vector animations inside After Effects. I often like to work this way as having a a clean vector animation as a base to work from can both act as a base or a fallback if the 3D explorations are not yielding many results.

This is what I referred to as the OT Click, and it's what I wanted the animation in whatever form it took to eventually resolve on. Using this as a building block for what would eventually become the final approved animation.

A big takeaway for me with this project was KEEP IT SIMPLE. As you can see in my early explorations above, this is NOT what I had begun doing. There are cloth simulations and random shapes I spent time modelling and texturing, all in an attempt to flex those 3D muscles but at the cost of ballooning the amount of time this project would take to complete.

The animation above was my first take at a simplified animation and was not far off from what would become the final. I drew inspiration for this from that simple vector OT click animation I had made at the very start of the project. The lines close in from the sides in the same manner that the O and T click together, and when blended with that click animation it creates a very pleasing continuation of motion.

Materials

The only material used in the 3D portion of this project was a default BSDF with the roughness adjusted slightly. The rest of what appears to be materials are all just LIGHTs . As seen in the screenshot below. I used various shapes and colours of lights to paint in the highlights where I needed them, which combined with some simple post-processing gave us the clean and simple result you see above.

Conclusion

Working on the animation for this was a great amount of fun. Collaborating with the team and watching all of our ideas come to life was a career highlight. Something I have yet to mention is that we did secure an outside agency TA2 Studios, to assist with the sound design for this project. See the video below for the full sonic experience! (THE WEB will not allow me to autoplay videos with sound, so you'll have to queue this one up yourself!) Enjoy!!