EDIT: Heh, figures, as I write this post, I figured out the first issue.

The other question I had, involves a different character and a complete different problem.

This character is a robot, known as a Geth, named Legion. His "eye" has a lens like a camera shutter, it opens and closes in the same manner. But it has something like 40 flaps. Would be very tedious to do that by hand.



Might not be easy to see . . . might not even be worth doing, given the light that shines over his eye. But still curious if there was a quicker way of creating such a thing.

The work in progress:

Hhmmm.....if I understand what you're asking, maybe use a triangular shape, and put on a circular path?

I'd use the "Tiled Clone" option, and then go for a radial pattern. This tutorial explains it quite well

Basically, create your base shape, that would be one "fin" of that object. It doesn't have to be perfect yet! Then go to Edit → Clone → Create Tiled Clones.

To understand what you're doing, leave the P1 "Simple Translation" on in the Symmetry tab, and set Rows/Columns to 1 and 10 respectively. This will create a row of clones of your object (each time 100% of the object's width shifted to the right, that's what the "P1 Simple Translation" does). Click Create to see the result, and then Undo again.

To rotate, simply go to the rotate tab, and select rotation per column, 36 degrees (because 36*10 = 360, full circle). The 10 because we create 10 clones -- the first clone will be on top of the original object. But if you then click Create, you will notice that this is not the pattern you want ...!

No panic, it's easy to fix. Since our first tiled clones resulted in a row of cloned objects, each clone should be shifted back 100% of the object's width, right. So in the Shift tab, at Shift X per column, fill in -100%.

Oh and of course, you'd want to move the point of rotation of your object. That's the little "+", when you click your object twice (slowly) in selection mode, it will appear.

By now (either using this crappy description or by the nice YouTube video tutorial ) you should have your pattern. The nice thing about clones is that you can just tweak the original object, and all others will change accordingly.