Tippett Studio uses its animal magnetism for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.

You can see it in the jiggling skin on a hairless cat, or the bristling fur of a menacing wolf. It’s state-of-the-art animal animation, as practiced by Tippett Studio in Berkeley, Calif. Founded 25 years ago by two-time Oscar winner Phil Tippett, the studio has become a go-to place for moviemakers needing realistic digital animals, and its credits include Charlotte’s Web, Enchanted, The Shaggy Dog, The Golden Compass, the Twilight films New Moon and Eclipse, and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. “It is a zoo,” laughs Tippett, who was the senior VFX supervisor on the Twilight films. “We’re in the furry animal gulag.”

His studio’s expertise actually became widely noticed as a result of the 2002 Clio Award-winning Blockbuster commercials starring talking guinea pigs and rabbits. “That’s when we finally got the look of fur to a place where it worked,” Tippett recalls. But it’s movie clients that keep upping the ante. “In New Moon, there were six wolves, and Eclipse had eight. The next movie has more.” (Tippett Studio is already working on the next Twilight film, Breaking Dawn.)

Since fur sucks light like a black hole, the studio has developed proprietary tools for handling millions of hairs on each animal. Tippett’s fur tool Furrocious has evolved into Furator, which enabled the studio to keep up with new challenges. Tom Gibbons, the animation supervisor on both Twilight films, says, “Each wolf in the first movie had 3 million hairs on it, and in the second movie it had 18 million. We built technology to support that much hair growth per frame, per wolf, and not slow things down.”

One secret to Tippett’s success in the animal kingdom is the care taken while shooting the plate photography into which the animals are placed. The on-set visual effects team on the Twilight movies gathered high-dynamic-range images (HDRIs) that later enabled the studio to render wolf scenes using gobal illumination. As Gibbons reports, “With HDRI information, we could drop a wolf into a scene and it would look 70 percent there.”

That’s when the tweaking begins, Gibbons adds. “Actors get little bounce lights and kicks in order to make them look dramatic,” he says. “We have to do the same thing for the wolves or they won’t fit with the actors. We have to hand-place those things artistically.”

An essential step in creating believable digital animals is making sure that eyeline information is gathered during shooting so that interaction between actors and animals appears plausible. As Tippett remarks, “You have to bust the eyeline issue immediately. We use every trick in the book. Sometimes it’s just a marker on a C-stand.” Tippett’s matchmove team is also scrupulous about gathering camera information and laser scanning film sets, and the point cloud data they capture is crucial for reconstructing scenes efficiently in post.

A key production technique Tippett touts is previz, which his team creates using Autodesk Maya. “We use previz to speed things along. If a camera was 18in. off the ground with a 35mm lens and an 18-degree tilt, we’d work out our choreography to match. So when we’d get the plates, we’d just pop in our previz and have something the editor could use immediately.”

Previz has helped avoid problems, too. When Tippett was shooting the Twilight saga on location, Gibbons’ team back at the studio used Google satellite imagery to recreate camera setups. This approach would alert them if an impossible shot was being contemplated. “We proved that they couldn’t do a shot where the camera had to move from 14mph to 22mph,” Gibbons says. “I started testing [virtual] 8mph moves and trying a zoom out at a certain speed and seeing if that approximated the shot they wanted. I was able to give Phil camera information so we could propose an alternative.”

While the Twilight wolves are emblematic of Tippett Studio’s approach to animal animation, the most recent example can actually be seen inCats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, with its hairless feline villain. “Our fur tool was created for the first Cats & Dogs,” says VFX Supervisor Blair Clark. “And now after 10 years of refinement, we’ve done a hairless cat. We knew this character would be hard because there’s no fur to help mask the problem areas. She’s covered with a layer of peach fuzz, which we had to make sure didn’t seem like a layer of synthetic skin.”

Cats & Dogs Animation Supervisor Will Groebe, who was responsible for a fully digital pigeon and a curly haired puppy as well as Kitty Galore, says, “Even if I could see all the fur immediately and was animating in Maya with a fully rendered character that I could move around in realtime, I’d still be struggling to make it look like it was acting and not being puppeted. It’s always about the performance.”

In the case of Kitty Galore, Clark wanted to provide the visual effects team with a famous film reference of what her performance could be like, and came up with Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond role in Sunset Boulevard. “She was crazy, but considered herself extremely hot,” he says.Sunset Boulevard. “She was crazy, but considered herself extremely hot,” he says.

The challenge is always to balance dramatic behavior with recognizable animal movements, like ear flicks and tail movements. “When you look at your pet, you see they do all these little things that you take for granted,” Clark says. “In a performance with a CG animal, everyone is focused on it being CG and waiting for it to fail. If you don’t nail one of those ear twitches, it discredits the whole performance.”

Groebe agrees. “If the director wanted the cat to jump up on two legs and dance the Charleston, we’d still have to see what cat behaviors could we fit in,” he says. “For example, our cat has to carry a mouse around in her hand. A cat can’t walk on three legs nicely. So in those shots we have her take a step and pause and talk, so you don’t realize that she can only put one front foot down because she’s carrying something. All you see is the fluidity of that one step and don’t notice that she wouldn’t have been able to take two or three without appearing clunky.”

Tippett Studio already has more virtual animals in development, and though the technology continues to improve, Groebe says one thing never changes. “People didn’t think of Snow White as a drawing,” he says. “It comes down to being inspired and making the animation look as real as possible and not like a digital image. The hardest thing is still the art.”