Author Ubuntuist - www.elysiun.com member
Hyperlink http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=72162
Category Animation
Title Using pydriver for wheel rotation along path

TUTORIAL AS QUOTED FROM SOURCE

I made a little test scene for using them for controlling wheels when vehicle follows path.

I did not find any previous examples of doing this so here is my solution:
When the length of the curve (actual length, not path length) and radius of the wheel are known, the rotation can be calculated based on Speed-curve that controls the vehicle motion.

Here is the expression from my sample file:

b.Ipo.Get("ppspeed").getCurve("Speed").evaluate(b. Get("curframe")) * (47.5/21.1) * (-36)

47.5 is the lenght of the path and 21.1 is perimeter of the wheel.

I did not quite understand the logic of the rotation handling of this driver. Rotations are n * 10 degrees, so if I want to rotate object 90 degrees, the script must output 9. Thas why there is 36 in the expression above.

BLEND FILE

www.arthis.jyu.fi/blender3d/images/karry.blend