I want advice on how to animate an overhead garage door with native dynamic components.
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Is it a rollup door or your more typical residential garage door?
Typical residential garage door
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This animation is done using the Ruby API. However you will note that the garage does does not rollup along the track as it would in real life. I could have attempted to program that but the crazy kinematics involved is more than I wanted to tackle.
I have no idea if this sort of thing is even possible with dynamic components, my suspicion is that it is not but you will probably need some input with someone who is much more familiar with dynamic components than myself.
I simply determined the initial position and orientation and the final position and orientation and then built an animation routine which positioned and rotated the door incrementally between the two cases as shown.
A simple swinging door is much more easily to calculate since it only involves a rotation about a fixed point. This garage door opening involved a rotation about a fixed point as well but as you can see it is a major oversimplification of what actually happens in real life.
I have actually thought about this problem quite a bit just because I like these kinds of mathematical/physics challenges. Done properly one would animate each door panel as a separate body. Each panel would move vertically at first then at a certain point it would rotate and then it would move horizontally toward the back of the garage. It is actually quite an interesting problem in kinematics if you really dig into it. While all this is going on each panel should remain connected or nearly so to the panel above and below it (interior pivot point).
If I had more spare time to burn I would probably replace my current animation routine with a proper one as described above but so far other development tasks have taken a much higher precedence.
I am really curious if I handed my current animation ruby code to ChatGPT, and instructed it to modify it to the more kinematically correct path, what would it come up with. I may test that out, just for curiosity sake.
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Animating a garage door wouldnât be difficult. I think doing it as a DC might be a big challenge. I did a sort of similar animation for some shelves. Obviously thereâs only be a single up or down motion.
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panel door animation 2.skp (27.7 KB)
not perfect but close enough if track indicators removed
so true
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This isnât perfect either but again it is close enough.
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Serious question - who needs animated garage doors in their CDs?
I get having either open / closed (I do that a lot with Nanawalls, sliders, and barn doors) - but I donât need it to actually moved up and down the track like it would in real life.
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Sometimes it is not a matter of if you âshouldâ you do it but more a matter of âcanâ you do it.
I just thought it might be an interesting challenge. As it turned out it was actually easier to program than the logic for opening and closing of bi-fold closet doors, that one actually made my head hurt.
As far as construction documents go there is not really anything I can do there, not until SketchUp gives us a real time API for Layout (fingers crossed).
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Ahhh. Ok. I thought this was a feature request / new addition and I was like ⌠why?
But yes, the âcan I do it?â is a legit reason.
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This looks good. Better than anything I was able to do. Thanks
In addition to ConDocs, Presentation Drawings might also be required. Showing open, closed and partially opened doors perhaps helps convey intent.
Nino
Attached is the DC I use for these cases:
Enjoy
Nino
dc DOOR Roll-Up SECURITY Horiz Grating.skp (148.9 KB)