Gonna be adding on an extra toe to the back set (already integrated into the target mesh). front torso and front arms have are pretty much ready to go now.

Got as far as I could, Going to need to resculpt the feet as their own new mesh to finish the job

back feet done 🍻

🤔 gonna try something different, not liking how the fur system was coming out.

forgot to fix the pacing haha. (too much camera shake though...)

🤔going to bump mapped fur since the particle fur wasn't really working out. Can throw on mesh deformations using those maps, though it'll mostly be limited to within blender I'm thinking.

Breakdown of how that could work.
one pass of a subdivison surface to get the initial mesh density, giving the next modifier enough to work with.

Pair the height maps with a displace modifier to control the height and intensity to bring in the main displacements.

Run another subdivision modifier afterwards to even out the forms and bring up the mesh density to render quality.

Base Mesh: 14K Faces / 27.6K Tris
First Pass: 47.2K Faces / 94K Tris
After Modifiers: 135K Faces / 269.3K Tris

Not every efficient to uniformly subdivide the mesh even once to say the least. The base mesh would be importable under the polygon limits of something like VR Chat ( 20K faces max)

No plans to do that yet, just an example.

But... for non-realtime 3d Renders or targeting future hardware, it could work fine, or relying on tessellation an existing engine.

Handle Birb Gently...