Animate the rolling of a metal curtain

[Emmanuel]

Hi all,

I installed a metal curtain in an extension I'm building next door, and filmed the installation. You can watch me in action here:



hey yes, that's how a career change into a Youtube influencer starts!

I sent the video link to the manufacturer to check that I hadn't made a mistake in the assembly, and he loved both the video and the 3D animation of my logo. As a result, he asked me for a quote to do the 3D animation of the metal curtain installation stages ! The animation will be providede to his clients to help them in the assembly process.

Most of the animation will be fun to create, and sliding the slats into the guides is easy, but when it comes to animating the winding of the slats around the axis, that's going to be another matter!
I was thinking of using Modeler's IK tools, which I know well, combined with the JointMaster plugin, but there may be more elegant methods based on physical simulation in the Workspace.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[trueBlue]

Example:
Modeling and Animate a Roll Up Garage Door in Cinema 4D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=borAvkQr4BE

[bitkar]

i can understand "garage" :D

[Emmanuel]

Example:
Modeling and Animate a Roll Up Garage Door in Cinema 4D
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=borAvkQr4BE

That's an interesting approach.
Here the slats are handled as a single object. But this tends to lead to errors in trueSpace. My rule with trueSpace is always : keep it simple !

I have been thinking of using fixation points. This is a very useful feature in physical simulation. The idea was to connect each blade between the one before it and the one after it, using fixation points rather than building an IK structure.
But it seems trueSpace's fixation points are given to a fixed location in the 3D space. Unless I am missing something, fixation points can't move along the time, nor be relative to an other object rather than the whole space ; in other words, fixation points cannot be animated. Too bad.

I tried Workspace's fixation points and it behave like in Modeler...

[borgcone]

The metal curtain may already be completed, so here is just a reference.

[Fixation points]
It seems that with tsxAPI on the Model side, we can link fixation points with objects . However, even if we can do that, the physics simulation and rendering on the Model side may take too much time to be practical.
---- tsxAPI66.doc
tsxPhysSimSetFxMove (new for 6.5)
PURPOSE Sets for specified phys sim object to move its fixation points with object.
SYNTAX TSXAPIFN void tsxPhysSimSetFxMove(tsxSOBJ *pObj, tsxBOOL value)
----
I remember trying this API function 6-7 years ago when I was testing my plugin ptsxpy, but I can't remember the process or the results.

[IK]
The IK on the Model side will not work properly, especially when the nodes are close to each other. (The situation might be a little better with the tS5, but not by much.)

Furthermore, as we repeatedly save and load scenes on Model side, the shape of the skeleton often gets corrupted, so we need to generate a skeleton from a new scene using a script or C/C++.

[Collision detection]
Another idea I have is to combine the collision detection functions of tsxAPI and simulate the movement.

[Very old plugin]
Another one. On good old TSX-DN (mailing list), I saw a plugin-set which can generate tS animations of linked parts like crawler tractors or chains, but I have forgotten the author and the name. I think the idea was to import coordinates calculated from Excel sheets by Excel VBA into tS via a tS plugin.

[Finis]

I have no knowledge of doing this in TS. Maybe a method from Blender has a similar thing in TS. I used a free model of a roll top desk. The top would be like your metal curtain. There is no physics. It is constrained to follow a path. It can only move along the path. I think it is one object set to bend, conform, to the path. A system of many parts that don't bend, just rotate around their origins, could be more realistic but the bending is not noticeable.

Follow path constraints are useful for many things in Blender. Camera movement, guide particle systems, character walk, etc.

[clintonman]

Another old plugin, Virtual Caledonia, would be from the AniPak. It does chains and tracks.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041010001 ... e=Caligari

[Emmanuel]

Another old plugin, Virtual Caledonia, would be from the AniPak. It does chains and tracks.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041010001 ... e=Caligari

Yeah, vcTek was a very interesting product made by Dave Wilson !

Version 1.51, the one that is part of AniPak is running through scripts only. There is no user interface. The plugin interface simply let you choose the CSV, and COB files to load. It is quite difficult to understand how to build a machine because all the set up is done through these CVS files...
A gave a try many years ago but never could make an animation to play properly.

Version 2 had a user interface but I don't know where to find it today...

[Saul]

Emmanuel ecrit 'Version 2 had a user interface but I don't know where to find it today...'
I do

vcTek_v2.zip

(1.4 MiB) Downloaded 9 times

[trueBlue]

viewtopic.php?t=4139&hilit=vcTek+2