Rubik’s Cube

[Dan Ebberts]

You are correct sir.

Dan

[Tyler Paul]

I like the text technique and I’ll definitly use it.

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“Life Should Come With Backround Music”

-Brown Sugar Studios-

Tyler Paul’s Toonificator V3.0 – Example Clip

[Tyler Paul]

I’m looking for an expression that allows you to rotate a layer around another layer. Does it exist?

* * *
“Life Should Come With Backround Music”

-Brown Sugar Studios-

Tyler Paul’s Toonificator V3.0 – Example Clip

[Dan Ebberts]

I think you could save yourself a lot of trouble if you set the cube up centered at [0,0,0] with the faces parallel to the xy,xz, and yz planes (you can position the camera off-axis later). Then you’re just dealing with equations for circular motion in two dimensions.So, in the xy plane you’d be dealing with something like:

[Math.sin(angle)*radius, -Math.cos(angle)*radius, zOffset]

where you supply the variables angle, radius, and zOffset. The other expressions would be similar.

Dan

[Aharon Charnov]

Well I brute forced it. Although I like the expressions idea. I set up a simple example with each side of nine squares centered at 0,0,0. I also created up, down, front, back, right and left nulls to be have each side parented to. These in turn were ALL parented to one global null so that I could move the whole cube.

As in the posts above I comped all pertinent squares to the side that was to rotate. At the end of each 90 degree rotation, I duplicated the comp and deleted all keys in the new comp. I then re-parented to whichever controllers were about to make the next 90 degree move. And then I made the new 90 degree animation… And repeat.

Check it out at https://www.rit.edu/~accpph/media/00_ANIMATION.wmv

It’s not perfect yet, but the next one will be really good.

ACC

[Chris Smith]

Cinema 4D will do animated parenting 🙂 You could try it in that.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Joel Hooton]

I have already made one of these. I setup precomps for each “box”. Then I manually keyframed a rotation. Then, did it again. I have about 5 or 6 rotations done. Each side is its one comp so I can edit or animate each side individually. It was a while ago and I just wanted to see if it could be done. I will upload it after work. I made it in AE 5.5.

I also made a foldable paper airplane that i just have not posted yet. I might do that too.

Joel

[Steve Roberts]

You guys are making me eat my words … 🙂

[Tyler Paul]

Very nice. I can’t wait to see the final.

I had already had my cube set at (0,0,0) so that was nice. I also had the sides spinning but Dan’s expression seemed like a better idea so I went with it. The boxes are all set at (0,0,0) and I have used 2 radii values depending on whether they’re a Side or Corner piece. I divided the Degrees by 57.295 to get the radians because I couldn’t get toRadians() to work so that’s my first question.

Now I’m coming up to the part that made making the cube so hard in the first place and that’s keeping track of all the cubes. In programming I’m used to being able to add varaibles to a parameter and that amount sticking. (Example: a=a+1 and a will remain at that value until you tell it otherwise) If this were the case I’d be able to figuare out what boxes made up a face twist them around drop them, Choose a new face and again look at box positions to find the correct boxes for a face twist etc. With expressions as soon as I let go of a box (I change which face I’d like to control) the boxes reset to their original values.

My current idea is each box has an angle control for the 6 faces of the cube. Degrees are added to or subtracted from depending on the turns I tell it to make. This would allow me to keep track of every twist and turn a box has gone through. How can I make the angle controls count up 45 degrees and then stay there. I’m pretty sure I’ll end up with the same problem as I had just moving the boxes and expecting them to stay.

Are their any other ideas?

* * *
“Life Should Come With Backround Music”

-Brown Sugar Studios-

Tyler Paul’s Toonificator V3.0 – Example Clip

[Joel Hooton]

Here is the video

Each corner, side and middle of the cube is its own sub comp. They are parented to a Null and ALL of the are keyframed each roation. Each side has its own precomp so you can vary the picture or video or whatever for each. If you go to each the precomp for each side and look at Solid 1 there are numbers. Turn on these numbers when keyframing the main cube. It helps to identify what you are looking at when keyframing. Here is the AEP fiel
https://jmhooton.iweb.bsu.edu/joel/rubix%20cube%203x3x3.aep

Email me or post back if you have any questions

dzlqps(at)msn.com