Complex hangar door animation question

[spotlope 0]

(cross-posted from gmaxsupport.com) I'm working on a scenery project for the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum, and I've run across a real animation challenge. The doors of the main hangar are the folding pocket door type found on larger hangars... has anyone figured out how to make a good door opening animation for this type of hangar? Right now each panel of the doors is a separate box and can be moved independently. As I understand it, in the real world version the innermost doors open first and then drag each successive panel along the track until the entire affair is folded into the pockets at the outermost ends. For the life of me, I can't conceive of how to do this in Gmax! I can move each door individually just fine, and using Arno's splendid frequency-controlled animation demo I can make trigger the individual panels when I tune the nav radios to a certain frequency. But how in the world would a person link the panels so that when panel x is in a certain position, it would trigger the animation of the next panel y? If anyone has done this successfully, please clue me in! I will happily dive into this and conquer it, but I'd like to not reinvent the wheel if it's been done before. I've included a pic of my model in case I've not been as descriptive as I could be.http://www.spottedantelope.com/bwomack/fil...angar-doors.jpgthanks,Bill Womack

[arno 1]

I guess if you animate each panel separate and make sure the second panel only starts moving when the first is at the position you want, then you should be able to get the correct animation. But this is of course a lot of work, because you have to do each panel separate :).