I am a bit new to Blender and I've been working on whats called a Hoosier Cabinet. One thing that's got me stumped is how do I rig the Tambour Door. A Tambour door (see bellow) is a roll up door that rides on a track basically like a garage door. I can model the door and track just fine but my problem is geting it to roll up. I need it to not just follow a path when I press play but I need the door to roll up when I move it manually on the Z axis. I tired to follow the array of planks up a bezier curve but I was unsuccessful attaching the planks to the curve. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a tutorial that was specific enough, any help would be greatly appreciated.
One way is to create a subdivided plane and vertex parent the panels to the plane. Then you can use a simple curve modifier to deform the plane to a curve that matches the track on your furniture. As the plane moves along the curve, the individual panel inherits the normal from the deforming plane to readjust it’s angle, thus the panels do not deform, but simply realign. This kind of setup will also work for roller coasters and train cars.
Why is it; when I move the plane up on the Z axis it goes in the opposite direction?
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Ok I think I get it, its because the arrows are pointing down? Now, what if I don’t want the plane to render? I don’t see an option in the outliner to turn the camera off.
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lol, nevermind I see the plane is part of a group.
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Ok… after I subdivide the plane then switch to object mode; to create new panels to put in between the subdivisions. I can no longer see the subdivisions, on the plane, I can add the panels in edit mode then make each panel a separate object but do you know an easier way?
I created the subdivided plane and parented the panels to the plane’s verts, I then made a bezier curve. But now when I add the curve modifier to the plane; the door turns in the wrong direction and the planks become out of sorts - regardless of which axis I assign (see bellow). Please let me know if you have any idea what I’m doing wrong. Also I would like to upload the Blender file but I’m only seeing an option to upload pictures or video so if you could please help me with that as well I would greatly appreciate it. I apologize for so many posts but I really want to figure this out.
