I’m trying to make a garage door that slides up and down along a curved path that looks like an upside down L. I want each panel of the door to look like it’s hinged to the next panel, like you see with many garage doors and warehouse bay doors. When the door slides up, it should follow the path and go around a 90 degree bend until it’s in an overhead horizontal position rather than it’s original vertical position when it’s closed.
I first tried using an array of cubes that followed a curve using the Follow Path constraint, but then I discovered that it won’t work in the BGE, which is my ultimate aim.
I decided that an armature is necessary for this, so I created a chain of 6 bones by extruding them along the z axis. I then created 6 cubes (not as an array) and attempted to parent them one to each bone, so that each bone would move just the cube that was parented to it.
I tried Ctrl-P > Bone, because it was the only option that worked for me before when rigging a hard-body object to an armature without causing it to deform (I obviously don’t want that). However, I obviously did something wrong because the armature is acting differently than it did before, and the door panels all move together when any bone is moved.
Can anybody help me who knows what I’m doing wrong and understands what I’m trying to do? I’m not very experienced with armatures and forgot much of what I learned the first time around. Once I can get the panels to properly attach to the bones and set up the IK properly (I’ll probably use Auto-IK), I’ll try to work out the rest of the problem by myself.
To get a series of meshes to follow a path, I found the following procedure works.
creation empty at the hinge point of each door panel.
add a follow path constraint to each empty and position them along the path at the required interval - set their offset in units and keyframe them.
animate the empties so they follow the path by keyframing offsets.
Add a track to constraint to each empty with the next empty in the series as the target.
parent the individual door panels to their respective empties.
Press Play - they all move as they should.
I don’t know why a Follow Path does not work in BGE - I never use BGE, is this a quirk of BGE? I would always do this with a follow path constraint and an array, as I know this is the best technique - the same as you would use for a tank track for example.
Cheers, Clock.
PS When parenting hard-body meshes to bones, I use CTRL+P => “With Empty Groups” then assign all the vertices in the mesh to the one required bone.
I figured out how to properly parent the panels to the armature, got it all working, and then found out that the it STILL won’t work in the BGE because of some problem with the BGE not updating the physics mesh for animated armatures. That’s the explanation I got on stackexchange. I don’t know what the physics mesh is but that’s not important at this point.
What happens in the BGE is the door opens when triggered by a Near sensor, but there’s still an invisible barrier there so nothing can pass through. That would be the physics mesh getting in the way, I assume.
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