Animating a roll-up door

[Guest0527211403]

Hi Everyone

I'm making an animation of a facility and I'd like to illustrate a roll-up door opening. The door is similar to those found at

http://www.wayne-dalton.com/DS_350.asp

Since this should be a pretty simple animation (I don't want to spend too long on it), it would be sufficient for me to show the door simply going up (i.e. a solid door) but it somehow has to "disappear" inside the box above the door. The box is where the "rolled" door would normally be stored. The space directly above the box is used for something else so I can't just have the door hide inside another solid.

Has anyone animated anything similar in the past? Anyone have any thoughts on how to animate this? In the worst case scenario, I will "shrink" the door parametrically, snap a bunnch of jpegs and splice that into my animation. But I'd like to avoid that if I can due to the time involved.

 

[Hora]

Set the length of your door like this:

length = length-xxx

then regenerate. Each regeneration will make the door shorter with the xxx distance

Put also some IF conditions to avoid the zero length.

-Hora

 

[Guest0527211403]

I ended up making one that worked with animation...

What I had to do was make a skeleton model which defined a trajectory for my door slats to follow. The box that the door tucks into had a spiral curve on its midplane which was created with a curve from equations (cylindrical coordinate system was used). This was combined with a straight sketched curve (composite curve, approximate) to define the trajectory.

Each slat had two datum points on the midplane at the top and bottom.

The first slat was assembled using mechanism connections (planar connection) and then I defined slot follower connections to stick the two datum points to the trajectory curve.

The rest of the slats were similarly assembled except that the top datum point was also aligned to the bottom datum point of the previous slat. I then had to define slot followers for the remaining bottom points (mapkeys helped).

To animate it, I made a final component which I called the driver, which was a simple part consisting of a datum axis and a curve which ran perpendicular to that axis. I assmbled this using a pin connection to the axis of the spiral. I made one last slot connection which stuck the first datum point of the top slat to the curve in the driver part. So when a servomotor was applied to the driver part, it brought the slats up with it.

You can see a preliminary version of this model at

http://www.mooload.com/new/file.php?file=file01/280607/1183058784/rollupdoor.zip&s=t