Bird VFX

While working on the mobile MMORPG "Bitcraft," I created a lowpoly bird model and a shader that animates the bird, which eliminates the need for a skeleton / animation system. This puts most of the computational burden on the GPU and makes for a lightweight asset!

A bird in action!

A flock of birds, with some simple repulsion/attraction physics applied.

The bird mesh in Maya - it's only about 140 vertices.

This is the bird's shader graph in Unity. It uses a few simple sine waves to create both a wing flapping motion and body undulation motion.