Kitchen cabinet hinge - how to make it work

Hi, I wanted to create a realistic layout to refurbish our utility room and came across a kitchen cabinet hinge. I wanted to create an animation to open the door with the hinge component but I just can’t work out how to get this to work without either the door ending up in the wrong position or the hinge sticking out the cabinet. The hinge component I downloaded looks realistic enough but I think it may not be engineered to actually work? Any advice gratefully received.
Hinge-kitchen-cabinet.skp (3.4 MB)

Your hinge is a Euro-style concealed hinge. The open/close motion is not a simple pivot about a single axis as in the manner of a typical interior door. It is a nicely engineered combination of rotational and translational motion which prevents the door from binding up against its own cabinet or striking the door of the adjacent cabinet.

Here’s a video.

Perhaps a simpler cabinet hinge would be better for your purposes.

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@CarolynF is right. The only other thing that comes to mind for me is using scenes: creating a scene with the door closed and another scene with the door open, and then playing through the scenes. I know this isn’t quite what you were looking for, but if your end result is to refurbish your utility room, maybe you don’t need an animation. Good luck!

Hi, thanks to any responders. I know I can make the cabinet with either open or closed doors but it was really the challenge of being able to work out how to animate the hinge. Sadly I’m just not a good enough modeller to create the necessary parts or maybe it’s not possible within Sketchup rather than pure animation? Always pleased to accept advice!

And to add to the discussion: Do you really need to model the hinge? Just mark the dimensions as to where to mount it to yoour door.

With enough effort and the help of some extensions complex animations are possible (I won’t say easy) in SketchUp. With a lot of effort it’s even possible using only native SketchUp and layers / scenes. If it’s worth the effort for your needs is up to you.

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