How to make a cloner object subdivide?

[Brian Jones]

6363_cubedivide.zip

This is not random but it is possible to use a single cloner, a single cube and one texture tag. Almost everything can be keyframed so the values just change when needed. This is not the only way to do something like this, you could have objects waiting in the right place and just make things visible or invisible at the right times etc etc.
As for random, what do you mean?

[Scyld]

wow, that looks great! thanks brian. can i ask you to talk me though how you did this? how did you get the cloner amount to smoothly subdivide? when i tried it all i could get was a sharp jump. and how did you get the material transitions to work? i’d love to learn this.

re randomizing: i was thinking of throwing in some random rotation of some of the individual cubes, kind of like a rubiks cube… any suggestions?

again, thank you for your input, very much appreciated.

[Brian Jones]

there’s not much going on, the number of clones does do a sharp jump but it jumps from one clone which is 300 x 300 x 300 to 27 clones which are 100 x 100 x 100 (with no space between) so it ends up as 300 x 300 x 300. Then the cube’s size reduces a bit (100 -> 95) while the cloner size increases a bit (200 ->205) so gaps appear but the overall size remains the same at 300 x 300 x 300. Same thing at the next jump (27 -> 729 cubes).
That works well at the first jump because it goes from a solid to a bunch of cubes which are all touching which then separate – just before the jump I reversed the separation so it would be a solid again so the separation would be smooth.
No single cube in a Rubics ever moves by itself, they always do so in groups but individual cubes rotating randomly would be easy with effectors but too much rotation would cause the cubes to rotate through each other