It seems that Cappellaio Matto, Matteo Porchedda and the team create a new Cinema 4D plugin or tool every few days. Their latest release Extreme Gear creates rigs for gears in Cinema 4d as a once click process.
Extreme Gear is a Cinema 4D plugin that automates the rigging of gears and much more
Select a pre-modeled gear in your scene and then select the Extreme Gear plugin, and Extreme Gear will provide a rig and some properties for that gear, making animation a snap.
Extreme Gear can also work with multiple gears, or “a chain of gears”, setting one as the drive gear and the others as driven gears, eliminating the need to animate any more than one gear at a time to make a suite of gears turn in the viewport. Not to mention that Extreme Gear works out the gear tooth and mesh ratios, which can be an interesting calculation when attempted manually.
The usefulness of the plugin goes beyond creating gears however, extending itself to be used as a pulse generator in the Xpresso environment. This can be used to animated things like springs, pistons, or actuators – anything that requires mechanical motion actually.
Find out more about the Cinema 4D Extreme Gear plugin at C4DZone here.