Yes, I was afraid of that. I'd like animate the sheet being cut for the trim, then being quartered, then into strips, and so on. Ideally I would draw up a simple cutter for effect but I would settle for just the sheet. The problem is that after coming to work for my company (2 months ago) I quickly realized that there is a serious lack of structured, data-driven problem solving. Having been trained at Toyota, the one thing I know is that when you have an issue/problem/opportunity you have to "go to gemba" (in this case the manufacturing floor) to see it.

No one is used to that and we tend to meet in the conference room which is far removed from the shop floor. If they won't go to gemba (yet) then my challenge is to take gemba to them. That's what I need the animation for. Any thoughts on other software which would be better suited.

I have 3ds max, Cinema 4D, After Effects, and Flash. However, my experience level in all but AE is limited right now.

Thanks for the response.

William

I'm being the ball on this so I was hoping someone might be able to help me figure this out. I have to explain how a cutting process at my company works. Here is the process:

Sheet size is 32"L x 27"W of coated paper. We cut chips out of this sheet with a final size of 2"x1". Simple...but there are some constraints which prevent us from getting the maximum output per sheet.

1. We trim each side by .5" so the actual "live" area is 31"x26".
2. Regardless of the potential outage, the above "live" sheet is quartered in perfectly equal sections (15.5"x13")
3. Each quarter is now ready to "chip" but the first cut is a trim of .25" on the long side (now 15.25"x13")
4. The LAST cut must be .8" (machine constraint) so we can only get 14 cuts at 1" since we have 14.45" to cut from.
5. We rotate the 14 cut strips to cut them into 2" lengths. On this cut we trim .20" and have to allow for a .8" final cut (this is scrap) leaving 12" from which we get 6 cuts.
6. The result is 84 chips per quarter or 336 chips total.

I need to use something very visual (an animation) to show the we could get 409 (~20% gain) if we focused some time on this problem.

Anyone have ideas on how best to do this?