PERPETUAL MOTION.

It's been a funny day, the power went off about nine as the electric were putting in a new transformer. It will go off again tomorrow as they haven't finished yet.
I have been playing in Blender again and got about halfway with the most difficult animation that I have tried. I got stuck at 2am this morning and contacted Bradley Animation for help. He is obviously another insomniac or resides well to the west of me as he replied straight away and solved my problem. A good chap or chapess.

Here is the result of my messing.

 The sphere was on the same origin as the little gold things and I didn't dare move it. I have now and it looks much better. It still isn't rolling fast enough and for the life of me I can't work out how to synchronise their respective surface speeds. I would like to parent the centre boss to the gold vanes but haven't worked that out yet. This would take forever and a day to animate without Animation Nodes. There is a link in the video description to Bradley Animation but this isn't a tutorial, he calls them Nodings or something similar. I find them fun to watch if I mute the music.
Here is the node tree.

The green nodes concern the sphere and the second from the left lets me adjust it's position. I knew it did but was terrified of the job going belly up yet again and for the umpteenth time. If anyone is interested in the nodes then left click and the image will enlarge. If as is likely the controls on nodes are too sensitive then bang a maths node in, leave it at default multiply and pop in 0.25 or set it to divide and enter 4. It's the same. You can also click and type but that is a slow way of fine tuning. Likewise I think in degrees and Blender works in radians. I only use radians when dealing with constants like Phi or pi as Blender calls it. There is much more entertainment to be had from this as I like the effect.

They are Barley drilling here and if he hasn't finished tonight I'll try for some pictures in the morning. It's a very smart rig. They are a bit later this year but the ground has been so cold that it won't make any difference long term. Today was grass seeding so we'll have some sheep to annoy and be annoying later on. The joys of trimming sheep's feet and cleaning their bums. The former is much easier than it used to be when one had to use that funny curled knife. These days we use garden secateurs and have an aerosol full of smelly stuff to dress the hoof with. It's still hard work but does get them used to being handled so they or most of them let you pick a lamb up without giving one a good battering. Another job to look forward to is ringing lambs tails and bollocks. It's an easier job as lambs are light.
It's all go.
Stay safe.