Modeling A Wheel

This is the modeling a wheel exercise found in the CG Cookie course, Modeling with Modifiers. The specifications required modeling any kind of wheel that has a tire with treads and some sort of spoke system. This so that the array modifier gets good exercise. To be different, I chose a bicycle wheel (most folks model car wheels). This was much more difficult than I had imagined, given the criss-cross behavior of the spokes. I modeled a pair of spokes using Bezier curves and set them around both sides of the wheel with an array modifier and a mirror modifier. A major frustration was that I wanted to use non-destructive modeling to tilt the spokes, but was unable to figure out how. This isn’t nearly a perfect model, but I’m satisfied with it as an exercise.