If I haven’t already revealed myself to be a complete and utter dork about this werewolf stuff, this should prove it — I even did a dentition study, and of course, I had to animate it.

I only ended up doing the the front and side views, since animating the tooth schematic would have been even more overkill than this already is:

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The side view turned out to be the better of the two:

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Using human and canine anatomy for reference, I worked out how the transitions between the two would work with the aid of an intermediate form. One thing that threw me at first, humans have four upper incisors between our canine teeth, but wolves have six. Instead of just leaving it so, I had two additional teeth grow in at the top between the incisors and canines. Likewise, on the lower jaw, the wolf skull I used as reference had an additional pre-molar and molar on each side. Interestingly, while doing this study, I learned that canine’s molars are evolved to work like scissors. The lower jaw is slightly narrower than the upper, allowing the two to mesh along their interface, so the animal can cut and slice a kill’s flesh, to make smaller chunks that are easier to swallow. Some time later, I saw a zookeeper demonstrate this using a lion skull. Apparently this is a feature among all of the carnivore family.

In truth, part of the reason I did these animations was to test an After Effects morphing plug-in that proved to be a big step up from the freeware morphing app I used for the first few animations. It was also more processor-intensive, so while the results were nice, it took awhile to get them. While I started on a couple of other animations, I ultimately gave up before finishing them because it was taking too long, and I needed to spend my spare time drawing the comic again. However, in resurrecting these old animations, I pulled After Effects out of moth balls and realized my current computer makes short work of even the most intensive rendering tasks. Thus, I completed one of the animations which was the nearest to completion, and I will debut it to the world next week.