There's a little bit of twist that I still need to address, and some stuff with the mirror, but it's doing what I need for now. If I have extreme close ups I'll have to fix those little things.
Edit: Added a screen shot of all the empties I used to hook the cables to. I used empties to get reasonable control of not just the location, but the rotation of the vertex groups the curves were hooked to.
Edit the 2nd: The camera is zooming in just a little, then up. The ship that the walls are attached to is hidden, so there's some strange movement to keep the arms in the camera frame.
Wardred, I have no idea what is going on there, but one, I like the rigging that clearly went into it, how all the mechanical parts move, and two, it brings me bad memories from when I was at school and I had to do circumferences calculation in math class. Looking cool 🤙🏼
I'd cry if I was responsible for the math. I wasn't horrible at math. . . but this would be too much.
The only thing that's really moving is the door itself on the X axis.
The Hydraulics are kinematics anchored to the door on one side, and to the wall on the other side.
The "lower" boom arms are anchored to the top arms. Almost everything is using a copy location and/or a locked track constraint.
The cables were a little different. I have a whole lot of empties that the cable ends are hooked to.