Animated door with many parts - would you recommend rigging?

I’m making a sc-fi door with several moving parts for opening and closing.

The door has a central lock consisting of several rotating cylindrical parts that are supposed to click into place one by one, and the door opens by first moving slightly inward and then to the sides (the “door” is really two doors sliding apart).

I have no experience with rigging, only animation, but I was considering trying to rig this door. Primarily to be able to very easily reuse it in other scenes/share it.

As I’m a complete rigging noob, I don’t know if this is overkill or a waste of time, or if you would recommend making a rig for this. Any thoughts would be welcome.

No rigging is actually needed for animating a door in my opinion. Also, shouldn’t this question be asked in the other Animation thread?

Doh! Wrong thread! :eek: My bad! I’m sure an admin will kindly kick me over to the right thread.

Thank for the answer though. Animating it would be a lot easier for me since I have no experience rigging.

Rigging with an Action Constraint can automate the whole thing to open/close by keying one control. You only have to animate all the bits and pieces once to create your open/close action. Then that whole animation (action) can be driven and keyed with one control bone or panel slider.

The time involved learning how to do this may be worth it in the long run even if not really needed in this particular project. It’s pretty simple and fast to set up once you know how.

Lots of tutorials out there on this. You know the drill. :wink:

-LP

Edit: I think this can be done with object animation only as well… no armature bones. I think… I haven’t had my rigging hat on in months. I’ve always used bones. But like I said, it’s just an animation saved as an action and driven by another object’s movement.

Thanks a lot for the input Larry. As a happy amateur, with no looming deadlines, taking the time to make this into a bit of a learning project sounds like a good idea. I was primarily trying to figure out if this was a valid approach, which it seems it is. Which means it’s now … tutorial time! :slight_smile: