Rubik’s Cube

[Steve Roberts]

The Rubik’s cube presents the classic “dynamic parenting” issue. The only way that I’ve found to solve it is to fake it by creating different animated states of rotation that are not connected, then rendering each animation with a lot of motion blur, then dissolving between the states. If the rotations are fast, you get a zip-zip-zip effect. Oh, and that was in Lightwave. 🙂

But if they want it to be slow, and they want to see every face, you’re in for a hard, if not impossible time.

Anybody else?

[Tyler Paul]

Holy crappers, talk about collective conciousness. Not an hour ago I was sitting in a waiting room thinking “I wonder if I could make a Rubiks Cube”. I enter my apartment and BAM there’s your post. Good luck on finding a solution I’ll be thinking about it as well.

* * *
“Life Should Come With Backround Music”

-Brown Sugar Studios-

Tyler Paul’s Toonificator V3.0 – Example Clip

[Mylenium]

*lol* I’d give up right now if I were you, Tyler. Thing is, you cannot animate more than 2 twists at a time, after that everything goes boom and becomes unmanageable. You really can only combine multiple compositions where one’s end state represents the starting point for the next two moves. Think of this: For every move there are either 18 (3 squared cube) or 32 (4 squared cube) possible positions for each face with the next move. So after only 2 moves, you have close to 1000 possibilities, where your face can end up with the following move (4 squared cube). Like Steve said – this represents a major parenting dilemma that cannot be solved regardless of what tools you use.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Mike Clasby]

It’s not AE (java script I think), but somebody dood it.
Rubik’s Virtual Online 3×3 Cube

https://www.rubiks.com/lvl3/index_lvl3.cfm?lan=eng&lvl1=commun&lvl2=cbegam&lvl3=vrtcub#

Click the Play Now, then wait til it stops spinning.

Then click Scramble, then Solve and the double arrow key, it’s trippy.

[Tyler Paul]

I’ll just throw my thoughts out here and see if anything sticks but alas your most likely right.

You’ve got 26 comps for each indivisual cube

You could use the nine expression plugins for layer selection to represent the cubes on a specific side. Which side you would like turn will also be set buy an expression plugin of some kind. Even a numerical value to represent the front back left…. would work

The position of each cube will always land on specific points on a 3X3X3 grid.

By using the current positions, layer selection, and expressions you can asign which 9 comps you’d like to parent together and then spin them.

When the spin is complete all nine cubes will again land on those specific points on the grid and you can reassign spin again.

Anyone think that might work or see where I would hit a snag?

[Mylenium]

Yes, the underlying math isn’t that complex, but it is still difficult to implement. Thing is you always need to know where each cube is and which faces are currently side by side. Not impossible to do with expressions, but probably extremely slow.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Mylenium]

Yes, it might work, though it’s still a lot of hand animation and manually setting parameters. I’d probably look for a solution based on mutually exclusive conditions – if cube X is here and Cube Y is there, then cube Z must be in the middle and act as the rotational center. Like I said in the other post, it’s not unsolvable, but pretty complex.

Mylenium

[Pour Myl

[Tyler Paul]

Complex indeed, I’ll have it done by tonight

…maybe

[Dan Ebberts]

Sounds like fun. Here’s how I’d approach it. You really only have 22 pieces – 8 corners, 8 sides and 6 centers. The centers are easy because the don’t move – they just rotate.

I don’t think I’d use any parenting except to keep the three faces of a corner piece or the two faces of a side piece together. You have to keep track of the moves somehow, because the expressions won’t be able to figure out their own current value without recreating the whole sequence. So I think I’d use a text layer with “standard” Rubik’s cube notation of:

U = upper face
D = down, bottom face
L = left face
R = right face
F = front face
B = back face

Maybe use upper case for a clockwise turn and lower case for ccw. So a sequence of moves might look like: LFlf

For a simple scheme, where moves happen at fixed intervals, the expressions for each piece would use the text layer sequence info and the time to figure out where they should be right now in position and orientation.

Something like that.

Dan

[Tyler Paul]

I believe there are 12 sides.

The cube has 3 rows on the z axis.

Each row has 4 side blocks except that the middle row’s side blocks actually appear as corners from the front view.

* * *
“Life Should Come With Backround Music”

-Brown Sugar Studios-

Tyler Paul’s Toonificator V3.0 – Example Clip