I stuck this on the archive version by mistake, so here goes again.
I know you said we could have problems with the array bit, but I haven’t. It just seems to work really well. I wish I knew what I am doing right because I will be stuck if it does go wrong!
For my three-block crossply tyre I knew I wanted 60 sets of blocks (I worked that out from a real one) so I created one set, arrayed it to get 60, and then shrunk the curve to get the blocks in the right place. The tyre then looked a right mess so I scaled it down along the X axis (I don’t know what makes it the X axis, but that has worked for me, so it looks as if I probably never applied rotation, just scale), making it smaller until the ends no longer met. I then scaled it up along the X axis, very gently, until the ends lined up.
I left out the shrinkwrap modifier because it mucked up the detail in the tread. Instead I applied a solidify modifier to the tyre body, inflating it until it met the tread the way I wanted. I am happy with the tyre but the wheel looks more Lomax than Bugatti at the moment. That’s still WIP.
