Here's a quick tutorial showing how to use my point autorig script for Cinema 4D (showing off the new spline tangent controls). There are download and installation instructions for the script here.

Update: Now with more control over your spline tangents! You can animate uneven tangents and corners more easily with the latest version. I've also made a tutorial about the latest rig.
Update: The first version of the script would flip your spline tangents, I've put an updated version here that fixes that.

Do you like animating splines? I love animating splines! They're great in lofts, extrudes, sweeps, lathes, spline wraps and all sorts of other places.

Cinema 4D lets you animate splines in a bunch of ways, including by directly moving their points around with PLAs - but these are a mixed blessing. They don't let you control their curves, and if you want to keyframe one point, every point gets keyframed.

This script, 'Point autorig', will create nulls for you that are linked to your spline's points. Animate the nulls' positions to move the spline, and for Bezier splines you can scale and rotate the nulls to change the spline's tangents.

To install the script:
1 Download it here (it's a freebie)
2 Unzip it into your scripts folder (eg "C:\Program Files\MAXON\CINEMA 4D R13\library\scripts\" on Windows, or "/Applications/MAXON/CINEMA 4D R13/library/scripts/" on OSX)

To use the script:
1 Select the spline you want to rig.
2 Run the script (click 'Script' > 'User Scripts' > 'point_autorig').
3 You'll end up with a bunch of new nulls under your spline, animate them!

Read on for some more details...