Recognising a chess piece with bitboards

When the chessboard is stored in a variety of bitboards, how do modern chess engines recognise what type/side piece is situated on a particular cell? I'm having problems with this, since to find out what type/side piece a particular bit is, I have to always do:

if((bit_check & occupied) == 0ULL) ... // empty
else if((bit_check & white) != 0ULL) // white
    if((bit_check & white_pawns) != 0ULL) ... // white pawns
    else if((bit_check & white_rooks) != 0ULL) ... // white rooks
    ....
    else if((bit_check & white_kings) != 0ULL) ... // white kings
else if((bit_check & black) != 0ULL) // black
    if((bit_check & black_pawns) != 0ULL) ... // black pawns
    ....
    else if((bit_check) & black_kings) != 0ULL) ... // black kings

This is quite a tedious process and it has to be done quite a few times (for example, during move generation to see what is being captured). I'm not sure if I should just go with this or whether it would be faster to simply create a 64 array of type Piece[64], which will inherently store the piece type.

Which would be better, considering it will have to be millions of times, for capture analysis in the search functions. Am I doing this wrong?