[Brian Jones]

there’s a whole bunch of animation that shouldn’t be there – keyframes on the splines for the spline type and the angle that are not doing any good, keyframes on all the parts of the tire that are not doing any good – The parts of the tire don’t all have their axis at the center of rotation which can’t be good.
If you remove all the animation except the Align to Spline expression’s Position parameter the tire now follows the spline like it should. Inside the null I would make the wheel parts children of the tire itself (except for the brake which shouldn’t spin – well the brake rotor should spin but the brake calipers should not, but your calipers are part of the rotor so you’re stuck if you don’t separate them, then whatever the tire does the parts follow.
After that you can spin the tire in P.

12802_wheel3a.c4d.zip

[Brian Jones]

can’t tell without seeing the file (though maybe somebody can)

[Brian Jones]

I wouldn’t try and send 50 megs (though I think the limit is 100), I would copy the wheel and the spline it’s going to follow and paste them into a new project, save and send that. Sending is easy, there are two ways but the easier one is just to drag the file into the message window.

12798_wheelrotationalongspline.c4d.zip

Here’s an old file which does what you are talking about, I think, it uses some xpresso to roll the wheel as the align to spline moves it along.

[Brian Jones]

I do not, I did use Ubertracer, which started off free, and it was very useful. In the intervening time it wouldn’t work with one of the C4D versions and I lost track of it so I’ve never used 2. I don’t know if it will do what shows in that video – connect points of a sphere to a center point but not all of them (that’s likely easy with a selection tag) and not all at once (that’s the bit I don’t know).
Thinking about it again, perhaps it can be done by cloning points or nulls onto a sphere(which could be not all and not all at once) and tracing that.
Given that there are really not that many (34) in the video (if you are trying to replicate the look) it could be done by hand… or 34 two point splines with a constraint at either end, one that connects to the center point and one that connects to a random one of the points of a sphere with xpresso (or something like that)

Certainly the video looks like it could have been done in C4D with mograph

[Brian Jones]

can you post the scene file?

[Brian Jones]

making data additive is easy, you just feed the current data into the calculation then back into itself

simple (hopefully) example

That takes the Y pos from the cube adds 1 to it and feeds it back in. Execution happens top to bottom, left to right so it works. That leaves the cube wherever it left it so if you want a start position at the beginning you have to add some xpresso to reset whatever parameters you have when the frame returns to zero (or whatever works for your situation)

[Brian Jones]

from 30 to 40 looks like spheres cloned on a sphere (Object mode Surface distribution) with an effector of some sort randomizing the motion, with the sphere (or another sphere in the same place) connecting it’s points (maybe UberTracer 2 could do that) to a central point

[Brian Jones]

looks like 3 – 5 pulses as the lights or polys flicker or come on. That’s very easy to keyframe but if you wanted to do it with a shader, I can’t think of a way right now but assuming it’s possible you’d likely have to keyframe the start/stop though that would be less keyframing… GSG’s Signal might be a way (not free though) and you could use a noise node in xpresso to flicker lights or luminance/alpha/transparency (PixelLab has a short Tute on this). Lester Banks has a tute where the Vibrate tag is used, with xpresso again…

[Brian Jones]

since you are using triangles (thanks for the zoom) and they appear to line up (and should work) all I can think do check is to put the sequence you are using to elevate the clones into the color channel to make sure it lines up like you think it does. If you’ve done that I might have to see the file.

[Brian Jones]

Quicktime was deprecated in R19 and above so anything that used it is gone too. Apple is not developing QT on windows at all and has depreciated QT7 in favour of QT 10 on the Mac. So programs that use QT are having to build the routines in or abandon them.