CGSociety has a major article, recommended by Summit, on all that went into making the computer graphics to ultimately create the Quileute Wolf Pack wolves for New Moon. Lots of info on how they did the size, hair, eyes, etc. Very nice article.

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.

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 controlled lighting on our stage where we could shine very specific lights and look at how the fur responded, then we took it outside on an overcast day, which was perfect for New Moon.
Hair Raising
A real wolf would have hundreds of millions of hairs but a digital wolf will only have perhaps four million, so some interpretation is needed to achieve the same effect.
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. To mimic this, Tippetts’ texture painters painted three different sets of maps to dictate the color from the root to the tip of the fur.
Eyes and Face
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. The eyelid shape around them is definitely wolf.

Read the entire article here.

Related posts:

1. ‘Eclipse’: Behind the new and improved wolves
2. New New Moon Wolves DO look Better
3. Will the Eclipse Wolves Look More Realistic Under David Slade?
4. Fansites React to the New Moon Trailer
5. Kellan Lutz Identifies More With The Wolves Than His Vampire Character

Its amazing how they’ve put it all together it has inspired me to start learning more about tippett studios and how they make the wolves look so realistic , they sure have put a lot of work into it.