Back in July of 2012, Jørn-Harald Paulsen shared his Cartoony Wheel Maya script, which created a rig for a wheel that will allow for extreme cartoon-like squashing and stretching, all while allowing for the wheel to work within the context of a larger rig such as a car or a bike.

Since then, he has released the Cartoon Wheel Rig v2 for Maya, which adds some flexibility into the choices for deformations, as well as cleaning up some of the controllers and controller functionality, making it a much more practical effort for animation.

This version is a bit cleaner than the first version, though it’s a bit slower because of the wrap-deformer. I’ve added an option to turn on a proxy-object through main-controller so that it evaluates a bit faster

Version 2 for the Cartoony Wheel Rig is no longer limited to a lattice deformer, by adding in the possibility to add blendShapes to the wheel while still maintaining the shape for the spinning wheel. The controllers have also been cleaned up allowing for faster animation workflow, and also has dropped the motion path controllers that were a bit buggy in some cases. Check out the Cartoony Wheel Rig v2 from Maya here.