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A little material practice. Thanks for the models @Cerbera ! Rendered in Blender 3.0 (Cycles) 🙂

@hyyde Cool! yeah this works! Tubes around tube loop ()_1.mp4

Oh, my bad, i was expecting the spline to end and start at the same position after bending, needed removing few points. Now should be ok. Please confirm 😄 You do lose the bend thou, not sure if that helps in that case Tubes around tube loop.c4d

If you don't mind this: I don't think there is a procedural way to make this happen. The only way to do this is to apply a Current State to Object on your helix and then check Close Spline. But in order for that to work you should make your helix close properly. Set Start Angle at 0 and End Angle to a multiple of 360 - 1 or -2 (the -1 or -2 prevents the end and start point to overlap that could interfere with the animation when traveling from one point to the next, it could look like the traveling capsules temporarily pause on those points)

Okay awesome, this worked great. Thanks again!

Duuuude, thank you so much. I've decided to remodel it haha. Wish I had thought of this method with the twist deformer. It seems I always overcomplicate these things. Thanks again, I always love seeing the way other people do these kinds of things.

Make sure you are scaling in Object mode, not Model mode. CBR

Yes that's a good point Bezo. At the point I last dealt with / rigged this part the spring was still an editable spline in a sweep and had nothing LIKE that level of poly density. It's almost like the sweep has been placed under additional SDS and then made editable. And yes indeed, that will be a very large part of what makes this painfully slow. CBR

No I only mean that if you stop the animation at some point in it, then rewind to frame 420, you get one result, rewind again to Frame 420, or press A for frame update, and it changes, and AGAIN on the 3rd refresh. Trying to do precise animation under these nebulous update conditions is very frustrating. CBR

I feel a certain responsibility to help with this because I think I came up with the original rig a while back, which has since been made more complex and had other elements and parts added to it. It's certainly very complex now, and not helped, as you note, by a) viewport performance (xp calculations mainly) and b) looping an area not at the start, meaning the program takes a frame or 2 to catch up with where it is meant to be in the animation. And all this makes diagnosing the issue / suggesting a workaround / alternative method most challenging. I haven't found an answer yet. I would agree with previous posts recommending faking it if I thought that was going to be possible, which I don't. This is not a fixed camera as I understand it, and there is simply nowhere to hide any transition points in any of the objects concerned that won't be seen from some angle or other. And whilst attaching nulls to the holes in the Governer Arm seems initially promising, the question remains as to how those nulls would be also attached to the various parts of connected models in a way that could move a group of points at the end of each spring or armature without affecting the natural look of the overall deformation imparted by the keyframed FFD controlling the spring length and shape, which is very specific, curves with the central arm, and must maintain that during animation as it stretches and contracts. Very very difficult. CBR

I've got no idea what's wrong here. I also thought that a tag priority could be the issue but it's not. I haven't checked the OM priority though. I suggest faking it with a Shear Modifier (Curvature and Fillet off, Unlimited mode on) driven by Expresso. Make nulls that will serve as anchors on the "boomerang" thing and have the shear follow them. For the Shear fails I suggest the Spline Wrap. It's easier to control a spline on both ends and have the object be controlled by it. I also helps with the spring deformation. The scene was quite heavy to playback for my pc but did not disable all Xpresso tags to verify the source. If Xpresso tags do involve in low framerate then you might need to limit the use of them too if you plan on adding more moving stuff in there.

My first thought on what could be affecting unwanted offsets that vary per frame would be to check the priorities of your xpresso tags so that nothing is operating out of the desired sequence. But my suggested solution would even be a bit different, and more in keeping with the 3d animation fallback of 'just fake it': For the parts that must maintain contact with other parts on this contraption, partially disconnect and directly parent them, or use a parent tag. Then hide the resulting gap somewhere else that is covered by other elements. So for instance, split the geometry of the hook from the spring, perhaps only even the part sticking out above the hole. Parent this disconnected hook geometry to the hole. Then hide this gap from the camera somehow. If the hidden gap is expanding and contracting a bit, ok, you won't see it. And be content with hiding these imperfections. They become nearly inevitable on any complex, interconnected machine like this.

Just throttle spring itself has over 1.5M polygons. I understand you want achieve some point of animation close to real, but it´s simply too much. Making animations with lot´s of huge (polycount number) objects is simply pain. Not for animator only, but for internal xpresso calculations etc. too...