Twilight
Computer graphics have come a long way over the years and nothing proves that better then with the twilight wolf pack of the new hit movie New Moon. With the creation of not one but five totally unique wolves, all of which vary in color and slightly different in sizes.
Probably the most difficult part of creating the twilight wolves was the fur. The quality of the fur on a wolf varies from certain areas of the wolf. The body fur of the wolf is rather short and leathery while the belly and chest fur is longer and clumped together. The creators had to create fur zones for the wolves, there were five different zones to work with. All five zones had different degrees of fur that had to be worked with, from long and clumpy to bushy, to short and velvety.
While a real wolf has hundreds of millions of individual hairs on their body while the CG wolf has around four million. So a lot of work needs to be done in order to make four million look like hundreds of millions. The designers used a tool called Tippett. Tippett uses nodes which all merges back together as one to create the final look of a full body of fur.
Another aspect of the twilight wolves is their size. They are at least twice the size of normal wolves, easily standing head to head with a normal human being. The size of the twilight wolves stands at around four feet from toe to top of the head easily doubling in size of a normal wolf.
The twilight wolves were made with some human characteristics in mind, mainly in the eyes. The studio wanted to use the actor’s eyes in the wolves however that proved to be a difficult task for the animators. The human eyes took away from the wolf look so they had to play around with it to make it look more realistic. However in the end the results were spectacular and made for some of the best CG animation ever in a movie.