I asked a friend what software I would use to recreate this. He told me Sketchup.
I have spent an hour familiarizing myself with sketchup and an extension called Keyframe but I can’t seem to get the door to animate.
Am i wasting my time with sketchup? is there other software more suited for what I am trying to do?
This is what we are trying to replicate: Hangar Doors - 50% Available Width - 4 Door - 2 Track - Left or Right Opening Option on Vimeo
I don’t know Keyframe but this free plugin called Animator by fredo6 will probably be more convenient for such work. (Download Link)
I think that you can achieve the same results with SketchUp Pro with dynamic components running during scene transition.
I’m in no way an expert but ive just downloaded Fredo6’s Animator to use myself and this is the kind of thing it does in the tutorials on YouTube. Search Fredo6.
It sure looks like it may have been created in SketchUp.
I have used the Keyframe Animation plug-in from Regular Polygon, I briefly described it in an earlier topic on animation tools. See this post, my reply is the third one and it includes a link to a video I created with the help of Keyframe Animation.
Thanks for all your help. I finally settled on using SU-Animate to make the door panels move.
Unfortunately i am having an issue when i export the animation. The animation speed is either too fast, or it’s jittery.
I have produced a video of the problem and welcome any input. I’m new to Sketchup and learning as i go.
That is a nice demonstration of your predicament, good job making it!
I have no experience with SU Animate so I cannot comment on specifics with that software. However regarding the speed difference between what is seen “live” in SketchUp vs. an exported video, I’ll mention that I think the scene-switching action in SketchUp has a minimum (definitely non-zero) time overhead. Maybe 1/10th or 1/20th of a second? That time overhead is between each scene, which translates to between each frame during a live View>Animation>Play function in SketchUp. Therefore, I suggest not judging the rate of motion based on what you see in SketchUp when using the View>Animation>Play function where each frame is a separate scene.
So how else can you determine a proper speed, other than trial and error via repeated exports? That depends on the features of SU Animate, for setting the net elapsed time between keyframe positions. That elapsed time between keyframes should hopefully (to my way of thinking) not be determined by the frame-rate value you might specify. I would hope that you can specify an overall frame rate for the entire animation, and can specify the time deltas between the various keyframe steps. With those two input specifications from you, the software should work out how many frames that a given movement would consume (rather than force you to figure out how many frames you want the movement to span). But I don’t know how SU Animate works, which might not fit my view. 
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