Help Req, Roller Door - Assm Follow Path?

[brian]

Hi guys, Im under urgent deadlines and having brain fade. I Thought this would be easy to do, but for the life of me i cant get it working now...

I want to create a simple roller door by using some flat panels and driving them around a sketch as per the image shown. I have a surface as the sketched path and will add multiple instances of the panel to make the length but cant seem to fin an easy way to have all the panels follow around the corner?

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks much 🙂

Brian

[blair]

Transitional Constraint?

[brian]

Yeah thats what I thought as well, however I cant get the multiple instances of the panel following the ath with a transitional constraint.....

[SBix26]

The one I created a year ago or so is on my home computer, so I will have to go on memory here: you will need to have a surface representing the hinge/roller at each section joint, and this will be constrained to your path surface using a transitional constraint.  Then, of course, the sections are constrained to each other at the hinge.  In order to avoid flipping sections 180°, you might also wish to constrain each section's angle relative to some part of the path surface, and give it a range that makes sense.  Mathematically it's a pretty busy constraint structure, so you can still occasionally run into issues, but this mostly works pretty well.  Pretty impressive when using a driven constraint to animate it.