Tuesday, December 22, 2009

CGI Wolves in New Moon - An Interview with Tippett Studios

CG Society has an amazing article talking with Tippett Studio. They were responsible for creating the Quileute Wolf Pack in New Moon.


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.


"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. The key to looking at live reference is to form a knowledge base, study the creatures, their quirks and behaviors, the language between the pack. We looked for signs of what the creature was about and added those to the visual effects to make them believable."


The book described the wolves as having eerily human eyes. "We were told early on that they literally they wanted us to plop the actors eyes into wolf, which always sounds like a good idea on paper but it does not work visually," said Fredenburg, "so we had to play how much to accentuate them as human eyes and how much to push them towards wolf eyes.


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.


Mandy's Mind - I admired the fur in the wolves, it was very realistic in my opinion... I jsut wanted to snuggle uip or pet them ha!


See ENTIRE article here.

[via twifans]

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