Wire wheels in Cinema 4D

Ragnar Kullenberg

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Ragnar Kullenberg © 2005

Wire wheels in Cinema 4DWelcome to this tutorial describing my method for the creation of wire wheels.

Wire wheels can seem daunting - spokes criss-crossing all over the place. Lots of spokes....you see hours of concentrated work ahead of you. Using a couple of standard functions in Cinema 4D – Rotation, Duplicate and such – will make this task much easier.

Wire wheelsTo begin with let us take a quick look at look at how a wire wheel is constructed.

There are two "halves" of spokes – out- and inside of the wheel. They originate from the hub out towards the rim of the wheel. The spokes in each half cross each other, as well as the two halves crossing each other. Phew! If we look at the pictures above it might become more clear. We see in (A) how spokes from the different sides 8in- and outside) cross each other. In picture (B) we see how the spokes in a "wheel-half" criss-cross. These pictures show a wire wheel for cars. If we look at say a bicycle-wheel we will note that the spokes will be more in-line around the rim.

The number of spokes vary depending on the demands put on a wire wheel. I try to keep the number of spokes down when I make these wheels. After all it is more a case of look-a-like rather than exactness. A lot of spokes can take for ever to edit, not to mention a daunting number of polygons. Right! So how many spokes should we use? Well, a circle is 360° – one spoke every 10° give us 36 spokes - one spoke every 15° give us 24 and so on. I strive to get number evenly dividable with four – two spoke assemblies (in-and outside) with spokes criss-crossing each other in each half.

Limitations In The TutorialIn this tutorial I will make a spoke-assembly with 24 spokes in total. It is enough to make the wheel look acceptable, and not a lot of stuff getting in the way. I will only show how to make the spoke-assemblies – not how to make rims or hubs. These are easily done using for instance LatheNurbs and then dropping it all into a HyperNurb as can be seen in the very last screen-dump. Also I have not bothered with crossing spokes from the in- and outside. This is easily done by just moving the halves and do some tweaking. Right, enough, let us get on with it!

BA

(Picture from www.wirewheels.co.uk)

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Creating The First Pair of SpokesFirst of all we will start the whole thing by creating a pair of spokes that criss-cross each other on one side of the wheel. They will cross each other down by the hub.

1. Insert a cylinder and set its measurements. In this case I used the following settings:

Radius: 5m

Height: 200m

To make it a bit easier I also set the following – Height segment = 1, Rotation segment = 10 and Cap segment = 1.

2. Make the cylinder editable..

3. Move the pivot point to the bottom of the cylinder.

Click

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4. Set the position of the cylinder to 0.

5. Set Rotation to P = 22.5°.

6. To make coming movement easier set rotation of the pivot point to zero by clicking and change Rotation P to 0.

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7. Now copy the cylinder and rotate the copy 180° (Rotation H 180°).

8. Now we move the cylinders so they look like an X. Using the grid, move the cylinders two squares to the right and the left respectively. You should end up with the result shown in the figure below. Group the two cylinders.

Right, so now we have created our first pair of spokes that cross each other in one side. The next step is to create one half of the wheel.

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Creating Side 1We will use Duplicate to create a complete wheel side.

9. Select the grouped pair of spokes that we created in point 8 above. Select Functions > Duplicate, number of copies to 3, and rotation P to 360°.

10. We have now the result shown in the figure below. The three new copies of our original group are placed in a Null Object as per default. I usually delete the original and keep the new Null Object.

11. Insert a cylinder that will act as hub and can be used as a template. Place the hub cylinder in position 0. Set its Radius to 30m and Height to 100.

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12. Now move each pair of spokes to the outer rim of the hub cylinder as shown in the figure below.

13. Copy the Null object with the three spoke groups and thus create a second Null object. Rotate the new Null object H = 180° and P = 60° to get the result we see in the figure below. Ahhh, now we start seeing a spoke pattern....

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14. Next we get into moving individual spokes. Move each spokes lower edge to the outer edge of the hub cylinder. This is performed by working in points mode, see figure below.

When all the spokes have been positioned you will have something looking like the figure below. Note that the spokes are positioned so that they will not intersect each other....

So now we have created one half – side – of the wheel. Now for the other half.

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Creating Side 2We have now created one half of the spoke assembly that will make up our wheel. A normal copy will now create the other half.

15. We have previously created two groups (Eker1 and Eker2 in the figure below) with each three groups of spoke pairs. Group the two groups (Eker1 and Eker2) and give them a useful name. In my example below I named the new group EkerU. Copy this group (EkerU) and thus create a new group (EkerI in the figure below).

16. Rotate this new group (EkerI) H = 180° and P = 22.5° to get the result shown in the figure below. Now you have created the spokes assembly. Now you can start to modify the spokes so they fit your model better. Longer spokes for bicycle for instance, or moving upper or lower spoke edges to fit a car wheel. Of course, this is the time to create a "real" hub and rim.

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In my example below I used LatheNurbs to create a rim. The hub was created from the cylinder we used as a template earlier. HyperNURBS adds that finishing touch to it all...

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