Folding Fan

[moukidelmar]

I am working on a project for which I need to model a folding chinese stye fan. The fan must have two different textures one on each side and must be able to open and close in a realistic of at least believeable manner. I will make the fan shoot fire as the final goal of the project. The fire itself will not be dificult, but I am having trouble with the fan itself. Has anyone tried a simular project or have any ideas what might be the best way to produce this fan. I assume for the rigging I will need one cardinal joint that the individual slats of the fans will rotate around but I don't know how to rig that so that twenty slates can rotate around a single point. If anyone has any ideas on the subject please let me know.

[locvio]

how about this...
create a blade (lying on construction plane for me) ...
move the pivot point to the correct location at the base of the blade

duplicate with smart transform 19 times...
(to make it look like a fan)

(mine were called pCube1, pCube2, ... pCube20)

then run this in the script editor:

for ($i=1;$i<20;$i++)
{
expression -s ("pCube" + $i + ".ry = pCube20.ry / 20 * " + $i + ";");
};

now rotate pCube20 around y (last blade) to animate the opening.
(each blade's rotation is set to correspondingly greater fractions of rotation of the top blade)

..
let me know if you need the file..