I wouldn't encode that kind of animation within you're model, not if you want real control over it. Something like a car is pretty easily animated in db, simply a matter of finding out what number the wheel limbs are and rotating them as a function of distance = circumference of the wheel every full rotation. As for the movement, you'll probably want some kind of physics and control eventually, so encoding animation data within the model is pretty inflexible. Better off moving it with db commands.
If it were a robot though, you might want to have several animations encoded, and access them depending on conditions.
My basic rule of thumb would be, but not without exeption, encode animations in characters, but not world coordinate animation, just local. I also encode animation in things like billboard effects, 'cos I'm not brilliant at coding when it comes to things like sin/cos math but there's not much I can't do in an animation package. For instance in my retro entry, I have a whole lot of bombs about the screen, in midair. I wanted them to drift up and down gently, in a kind of mexican wave. I knew this would require sine functions but simply did not know the math. So I animated one bomb doing that in my modeller, then as I load each one within db, I increment it's frame, giving me a smooth sin waving effect of all the bombs. If you're good at math but not so great at animation you could have written a simple function to do that, and not encode any animation in the bomb at all.
Another classic example is the wait, walk, shoot type animation encoding, where you have those various actions animated in your file, then in db you set the start and end loop points to access those states conditionally.
I think someones doing something with car physics in another topic, check that out
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