For my personal projects, I have animated several types of animals such as insects and mammals but I have yet to animate a winged animal so I decided to have 2 pieces of bird animation. I found a decent woodpecker rig in order to do these animations so I decided to do a woodpecker flight cycle and pecking on a tree animation.
Whilst animating the woodpecker flight cycle, I felt that since woodpeckers flap their wings too fast, I wasn't able to show a nice smooth overlap in the wings. I also wanted to have a glide to make the flight cycle interesting but woodpeckers don't really glide so I went and found a good eagle rig that I could use instead to get the animation outcome I wanted. The eagle rig had individual feather controllers as well so that would allow me to have the feathers shaking in the wind effect which makes it seem all the more realistic.
The woodpecker rig was completely fine to still use for pecking so I continued to use that for the peck animation.
