I can't raise chickens where I live now, but I hope to have some someday
(my knowledge comes from working with friends' chickens XD)Well from my Mohican ancestors I say "Kwékwé", and my closer Cherokee relatives I say "Osiyo" to you my Shoshone friend!
As for making them like ostriches and Crossaway. Yeah, but they just PINNED the feathers there, they don't even make a decent tail. Both of those birds have tuffs or some kind of tail you can make out, and doesn't look like someone just took some feathers and pinned them there. What's weird is that the black, red, blue and purple mounts actually have a decent tail with some feather spray that makes it look intentional. But when you get to the armored 'swift' birds, suddenly the spray is lopped off so they can have that weird...tail guard thing? Leaving this odd pinned splay on the butt, leaving it where you can see they cut off the 'tail' of the original models.
Well the running with the head down isn't too much a bother to me but I wish it had more of a headbob like most birds when they move. Birds bob their head in a kind of flexing motion of forwards and back which fits their flexible looped curve of a neck. The motion of the hawkstrider and the tallstriders is a weird up and down bobbing motion which is more normal to mammals than birds.
It's a similar problem for raptors in game. Whoever designed the skeletons really didn't understand different species locomotion when it comes to the head. (they got the tails and legs right at times, but they miss it when it comes to neck and head work for some animals, specially non-mammalian.)
and
Are the more proper walking motions for bird like creatures. Even the hippogriff with it's bird like qualities should have a slight head bob that could also match with a deer's neck motion when walking.
It's always a big problem when animating. If you watch a hawkstrider or tallstrider walking, they have the flex, but when they begin to run, their necks suddenly turn impossibly stiff and flap their heads wildly. In a normal situation, this would cause the bird to be very disoriented and unable to run properly.
"Vision doesn’t mix well with movement. All animals, from insects to eagles, have tricks to stabilize the world. Many mammals, humans included, do this with slight twitches of the eye. This is instinctual, and comes from neuromuscular connections between our eyes and the part of your brain that tracks movement and rotation. Pigeons are able to move their eyes, but their longer, more flexible necks make it more efficient for them to do this motion tracking with their necks."
Which the tallstriders and hawkstriders have, meaning they'd be much more efficient moving their necks to keep their vision steady than trying the nanotwitching of mammalian eyes.
I wish they'd fix those things on the mounts. Not that they will at this point, it's just me being nitpicky from wanting to be an animator and studying so much about locomotion of animals when I was doing animation classes XD;; I can live with it, even if I still think it's a silly and improbable way for that kind of 'bird animal' to move.
Oh my. Nacht. 
I will never be able to look at a pink tallstrider the same way again. 
Does anyone happen to have a gif of it somewhere?
him. 
