How to animate "venetian" blinds?
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Hello,
I need to animate some blinds and it has to be "procedural" because the height and the lenght of the window changes over time.
My idea was to create a spline and extrude it to get "lamellas" with changeable lenghts. The extrude now went into a cloner.Now thats where I'm stuck I want it to "open/close" like in reality. I can change the step size of the cloner to fake it but it looks really unrealistic because in reality only the last lamella is fixed to the ropes the other ones just get threaded up as the you pull up the blinds. (I hope this is understandable sorry english is not my first language)
I tried it with a plain effector and a step effector, and I feel like it could work that way but I seem to miss something important.
I hope you can help me
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Hi Bottle-anywhere,
I'm practically already out of the door for my day off.
I will have a look into it later when I'm back tonight. (L.A. time)
Here is a little starter:
Enjoy
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I experimented with the formula effector a little bit myself. This looks very promising
Thank you very much Dr. Sassi ! -
Thank you very much, bottle anywhere.
This was a quick setup.
Please let me know what your findings are and what should be improved.
For example, do you need to have the blades rotated?
I'm happy to look into it.
Cheers
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Yeah I need the blades to rotate but that's not really a problem I can just rotate them when the blinds are fully extended if this would complicate stuff otherwise.
Much more important would be that the blades really only start moving when the get "touched" by the moving blade(s), the way it is now it works kinda well for the first few but then they start overlapping and moving upwards to early.
I also tried a different approach with two cloners one with a bigger step size and one with a very small step size. Then I used plain effectors to hide/reveal the blades as the "blade package" goes upwards. I feel like this solution could work if it's not a close up shot and would be my backup plan.
I also found a "blinds" file in the asset browser. But those are vertical "textlie" blinds which work exactly the other way around, basically the blinds move and the package stands still. But they did it with xpresso and frankly the node tree is very complex and confusing for me who never used xpresso before
So that's where I am stuck now trying to figure out how they did it and reverse it so that the package is moving not the individual blades ( I hope my explanation makes sense) -
Hi bottle-anywhere,
Here is a different approach.
We have two MoGraph objects, a Cloner and a Matrix, for the pulled and the released version. The Matrix is the pulled-up version, sharing that information via Inheritance Effector.
The Inheritance effector is triggered by a small linear field, and that Field moves up as well. The Field needs to move what the Matrix does, while adding over time the Package size as well.
This sounds abstract, but I hope the example makes sense.Cheers
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That's it! That's pretty much exactly how I need it to be.
Thank you so much Dr. !
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Thanks for the feedback, bottle-anywhere.
Thank you also for the question; I have set it up a few times, just for fun, each time differently. It worked each time.
I hope you can use it throughout the project. At the moment, it's not clear how to wrap this up in an XPresso/User Data option, but if I get an idea that is stable and easy to use, I will share it.My best wishes for your project
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Yeah I feel like it is possible with Xpresso but it exceeds my understanding of math and logic. I guess one would have to test around with ratios and proportions a lot
Thank you again! This helps me a lot already!
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Yes, you are spot on, bottle-anywhere!
That is pretty much the way it should go.
Cheers
