Built Aurelie's first articulated feathered body

Project Feathers started as a creature study. Aurelie is part owl, part rabbit, and deliberately difficult to reduce to a normal game-character pipeline. Her body is an articulated assembly with a native underbody, but the thing the player reads is the coat built over it.

The first complete groom attached thousands of feathers across the head, torso, limbs, wings, ears, and tail. Different regions use different shapes and densities: broad flight feathers, short contour layers, soft down, ear fans, and long primaries. Roots stay attached while tips respond to motion, wind, and body pose.

“The goal was never a character that looks feathered. It was a body that behaves as though the feathers matter.”

The eyes, face, ears, paws, claws, wing supports, and grounding all had to work before flight could mean anything. Running, sprinting, flapping, soaring, blinking, looking, and breathing are generated from the same joint state rather than swapped as disconnected clips.

The first flight model was intentionally assisted but not decorative. Lift, drag, airspeed, wing spread, incidence, dive tuck, pull-out, wind, banking, and energy exchange all contribute. It is not a bird simulator, but it gives the player a body with momentum instead of a free-moving camera wearing feathers.

That foundation still defines the project: make a small wild creature whose body explains what the controls are doing.