Why do my vehicle's wheels appear to rotate backwards? I'm animating the rotation of a truck's wheels, and they have a clearly visible tire tread. Everything works, but I'm getting a severe case of the frame-rate aliasing problem which means that at certain speeds my tires appear to be rotating backwards, or slowly, or even not at all. It's bad enough that I'm not sure I'll be able to deliver a movie that would help people to understand our technology.

My keyframes are designed to show the truck accelerating from a standstill, then decelerating to a standstill, so I run through a wide range of rotation speeds.



I also have rotating gears in a gearbox, and the problem's bad there too. Teeth, you know...

I understand why this is happening (periodic geometry advancing spatially but sampled at the frame-rate - it's a temporal aliasing thing)... but I'm wondering if anyone has come up with any methods for mitigating its visual impact. Note that I'm observing this in the 3D window. I haven't yet tried rendering a movie; but I don't expect I'll escape the problem in the rendered output.

Any wisdom?

Would motion blur help?
Motion Blur would be my answer for a good reason! If you blur something it will appear moving. Also Its like in real photography, if you are using cycles you can set a value for the shutter. set it to something around 0.8 to achieve best results. In real movies the wheels actually also appear moving backwards. You could do a slow motion. Or you could try to higher the framerate.