This weekend I had a go at extending the feather with wire how I originally planned it, poking the wire through the holes I made, and securing them with Polymorph (which should make it easier to replace a feather if necessary). Because I need the wire to be fairly thin, I tried strengthening it by twisting it together with copper wire. First I tried a double strand of really thin aluminium wire (can't remember the exact gauge, but much less then a mm) together with one or two strands of very thin copper wire (I only have some that is really thin). Then I didn't have any of the thin aluminium wire left, so tried it with one strand of 1mm aluminium wire with one strand of the thin copper wire. This actually seemed to get a nice balance between flexibility and strength, though I would have to test it to find out for sure.
I also bought some elastic band to try using this for the fanning mechanism. I used it double and sewed it around the flattened rods like previously with the stretchy fabric, but this time also using the holes I made to keep it at fixed at one place. I'm not fully satisfied with how it works, though it has some positive effect. At least the rods cannot move much further away from each other, and they are slightly pulling each other to follow, but not really as much as I had hoped. It does at the same time also create quite a bit of elastic tension, that might make it harder during animating to make subtle movements... I'm considering of I should for the secondary feathers just use a non-stretchy kind of fabric, as the feathers don't really have to move much separately from each other, but the primaries still need to...
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