New Moon's CGI Wolves

Source:CGI Society
Tippett Studio Jumps to the Head of The Pack with CGI Wolves a Howling Success
10 December 2009, by Renee Dunlop


As the New Moon rises, so do the stars at Tippett Studio. Charged with creating the Quileute Wolf Pack for the Twilight sequel, some of the industries leading character artists sunk their teeth into just under 60 shots ranging from three to twelve seconds that were pivotal to the storyline. And those shots are getting noticed.

Wolf Mountain and Frankenwolf


The challenge wasn't just to build a believable wolf, but to build five unique wolves of extraordinary size and weight, to portray that mass often with little more than the surrounding trees as comparisons, create believable fur and humanesque eyes that weren't distracting. Nate Fredenburg, Art Director, helped to make sure those requirements were fulfilled, combining real-world attributes and CG magic. "At Tippett Studio, we always look to real-life creatures for reference on how to design our characters, real or mythical. For New Moon, we had a special opportunity to travel down to wolf sanctuary in Southern California to observe wolves up close and personal."

"We had a bunch of photographs of wolves that we were studying but Phil [Tippett] was insisting that we take it to the next level and have something to touch, walk around, and actually do your own," explained Fredenburg. This resulted in the creation of what became affectionately known as the "Frankenwolf".

Tippett bought wolf pelts and cut them up with an Exacta knife and pasted it onto a taxidermy blank "so that we could do a lighting lab in two conditions..."

Hair Raising


One of the key observations we made at Wolf Mountain was the complexity of the fur. From nose to tail the fur quality changes, prompting the painters to create a zone chart of the animal that divided the wolf up into fur zones; on the nose and the legs the hair was short and velvet, on the neck the mane was thick and long, belly clumped and long, the back more medium length while the tail was bushy. The coloring was not only unique over the length of the body, but the hair follicle had unique color ticking from root to tip.

"Even with as far as computing power has come," said Fredenburg "it still is very difficult to accurately mimic real life, so everything we do to come up with our fur look is an approximation, a cheat. It's not about replicating a wolf hair for hair; it's about getting the feel of a wolf. Even though we pushed 4 million hairs on this show, which is twice what we normally grow, it is still not nearly the number of hairs a real wolf has."



Wolf coloration is rather complicated due to the multiple color changes, not only across the body but down the length of the hair. A grey wolf might have dark roots and a white band in the middle and a brownish tip, yet add it all up and you have a salt and pepper look.

Keep Your Shirt On


The wolves also had to switch from human to wolf form and back again, creating some humorous situations. Tom Gibbons, Animation Supervisor, got a chuckle out of the young wolf shape-shifting process and the dilemma it created. They wanted to approach this in complete opposition to the way they did it in American Werewolf in London, which highlighted a long protracted painful metamorphose.

In Twilight, it's very fast, it happens in half a second. "In the blink of an eye the boys explode into wolf forms. When you first become a werewolf, you are not very good at controlling it. What happens is, these kids explode into wolves and destroy their clothes and shoes, and when they transfer back, they don't have any clothes and have to go get more. It's kind of like hitting puberty or something, as these boys mature from human boys into shape shifting into werewolves and not being able to do it very well, which is the perfect metaphor for everything that is adolescent."

There is a great deal of ribbing among the digital wolf pack as well as what was observed at Wolf Mountain. "That is exactly the way wolf packs work. There is a lot of rough and tumble challenging play fight all the time."



Phew, that was a lot of information. Super wolfy-tastic though, right? To read the full article click here .

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