I would like to constrain a wheels bone to rotate on the x-axis like the roll of the rollhandle of the bone of a steering wheel,
but am lost on how to set this up. ( see attached picture )

Any hints anybody?

Probably the simplest way to do it is to use a pose:

1) Create a new pose for your vehicles steering that runs from -100 to +100.
2) At +100 turn your wheels to maximum right turn
3) At -100 turn your wheels to maximum left turn
4) In your choreography or Action use the steering pose to control the position of the vehicle's wheels.

Alternatively you could have a small bone at the pivot point of the front wheels which orients-like the steering wheel and make the existing wheel bones children of these small "steering bones".

Thanks a lot Paul,
both methods worked like a charm.
I enclose pictures of the second solution with the steering bones rolling like the steeringwheel bone,
which has the advantage, that the steeringaction is actually steeringwheel driven like in real live.

Next I want to add the turning of the tyres.
Maybe you could help me on this as well.
Is there a possibility that the turning speed of the tyres adopts automatically to the speed of the car?

If you will be constraining the wheels to a path you can use " Has Stride Length" otherwise it is a case of using expressions or just winging it. I am far too inexperienced with expressions to be able to give you any guidance though.

You might find this useful as well.

Vehicle Bones

So now I implemented a constrained steering, which is working allright in the pose.

Next I added some wheelturn , quaternion rotate, two turns (720`degree ) on 40 frames.

-Does the wheelturn look o.k.?

(It seems to be, but I am kind of unsure looking at my realtime wireframe represantation)

-Can I change the speed of the wheelturn somehow, without being constrained to a path and without an expression?

Next I added some steering action with my poseslider.
I can see the keyframes, but the steering is simply not moving.

-Any hints, what can cause this?

I enclose the prj for investigation

Your project is asking for a chor file. The action only consists of the tire rotation, no steering.

without thinking too much about this yet, Im thinking I would have 2 bones or 1 bone 1 null for each wheele.
Say, the null is the parent. It turns with the steering wheele, if you are using expressions to drive this behaviour.
And the bone would handle the wheele spinning.
that way you can keep the rotations and math seperate.

Mike Fitz
www.3dartz.com

-Seems I have found the culprit.

The chorrange somehow is misteriously set to 4442 , so that the animation in the steering only would show up very, very late.

I dont know , what causes this, each time I correct the setting to 80 and restart AM the chorrange is set back to 4442 again.

Any ideas anybody?

( Also , can I lock it somehow, that I go accidentally to minus keyframes? )
The zoom to fit doesn`t really seem to do the expected for me in that window.....

Managed to get it to work,
though the setting of the chorrange doesn`t get saved,
even when I saved it under different names.

Maybe I am overlooking something really simple here.

Added two pathes and let the car jump from one to the other.

Check the chor range in every action and chor action of every model.

Thanks a lot

It was also changed in the path and camera chor actions properties.

Again I would have been lost without this excellent forum and your help.

I also noticed that you can lock the chor range there, so that you cant change
that anymore unvoluntarily.
A similar lock for the timeline, that you cant go to minus keys would be great...