For my final project, I combined the Boids algorithm, which simulates a flock of birds, with linear blend skinning to use Boids as a technique for animating a 3D character. The boid flock I created will by default, act just like a natural flock of birds, but on command, will assume the shape of a 3D mesh and even follow its animation. For performance, the boids are multithreaded and the update timestep will automatically change based on the compute time, so that the flock will move the correct speed, even if a slower processor limits its update rate.
Here is a demo and further explanation of Boidwalker: