Haliaeetus leucocephalus or The North American Bald Eagle, is a species of birds native to North America. They are carnivores with a diet consisting of:
I am currently working for an indie game studio (a company or collective that makes video games not published by big “AAA” studios such as Nintendo or Microsoft).
Our studio, known online as “Wood Finch Studios” is registered in Colorado, but we do most of our work online, through a messaging app called “Discord”. We (Wood Finch Studios) utilize an EPIC based workflow, through the Project Management Dashboard “Notion”. Epics are smaller projects broken up into even smaller Deliverables, spread out between departments.
Inspired by the TikTok “Bird game” trend, in which people would use OpenAi’s Sora Program to make entirely fabricated video game gameplay (non-responsive videos of someone else playing a video game) of a fake Early 2010’s game called “bird game 3”, which consisted of birds fighting each other in arena style fighting game, or occasionally an MMORPG1. These videos were entirely AI generated, and were popular from August 2025 to late November 2025
This animation is for the Eagle character, depicting the Digital Eagle doing a two winged swipe. This is unrealistic to nature, as eagles primarily use their claws and beak to hunt prey, however the team felt that it would look more appealing if the attack is quick and snappy.
I animated all of this using forward kinematics, which is a form of animation where each bone is moved separately, as opposed to Inverse Kinematics, where only the “Top” bone is positioned, and an algorithm places the rest of the bones. The upside of forward Kinematics is that it allows more control, but is much more time consuming.
The main hurdle I had to go through was Program support, as the eagle was modeled and rigged in Maya2, but the software that I primarily use to animate is Blender3. This meant that when we exported4 the final file or “Rig” to blender, the bones displayed wrong, due to the two programs not meant to interact with each other a ton. We ended up fixing the error, and I started on the animation. One thing that slowed down production was the fact that while my teacher allowed me to work on it in class, the main time allotted happened to fall at the same time as a Senior Portfolio class I was required to take for graduation, despite having already done all of the things we were required to do for the class in the prior semester, as I have already applied to colleges. This “graduation requirement” significantly slowed down my progress on most of my projects.
In the end, this is probably one of my favorite animations to work on. because I got to focus on what I love doing (Animating), and not on 3d modeling or rigging (that was handled by a different team member), I had more time to animate, and make it the best it can possibly be.
The game, currently codenamed “Birdgame” is projected to have a beta launch in late 2026.
1 MMORPG’s or "Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games” are a subgenre of the RPG (role playing game) video game genre. They primarily focus on teamwork and cooperation.
2 Maya is a 3d modeling software used to make 3d models and animation published by autodesk.
3 Blender is a free, Open source (Meaning its code is open to the public, and anyone can contribute to the project) 3D modeling and rigging tool used to Model, Rig and Animate 3D models.
4 Export, in the context of 3D modeling, means to transfer one file to another, to be used in a different program. most softwares have their own, Proprietary file type that cannot be used by other programs (.blend .My .PSD etc), so they must be turned into a more generalized file that CAN be read by other programs (.PNG .OBJ .FBX etc).