A mere 60 shots ranging from a short 3 to 12 seconds showcase the work of Tippet Studios in the movie New Moon, as wolves race through the forest with extraordinary realism. CGSociety talks to them about it and gets some great details on the tools and processes they use in-house.
To help achieve the fullness and fur realism needed, Aharon Bourland, Technical Art Director and Look Development, helped create Tippetts’ in-house tool, Furator.
New Moon was the second Tippett film where this tool was used. Similar to Shake in that is uses a tree-based system, it allows for characteristics of hair to be added via nodes, then merged back together for the final groom.
It was developed to be highly flexible and extensible, such as the ability to twist a group of hairs from the tip and leave the base alone.
Another very helpful addition was Scraggle, a tool that used a CV interp node that increased the number of CV’s and resulted in a scraggled hair, then further adjusted so that the majority of scraggle was towards the base, creating the illusion of a thicker undercoat with smoother fur on top.
via CGSociety – NEW MOON.
