Rubik's cube question

I have a Rubik’s cube model and I want to animate the spinning of the faces. Is the best way to handle the animation by just selecting the cubes in the face I want to spin and then set the new position, or is there a better way to do it? Selecting the 9 cubes for animation key time will end up being time consuming.

It would be nice to be able to select an empty, or something, and just apply the rotation to it, but pretty sure that won’t work because a cube can belong to multiple faces.

Any good solutions out there?

Thanks.

If the animation is simple, a few empties would work well. But for this just make sure that all the pieces of the cube have their object centers in the center of the cube. Then parent all the pieces to one empty. That way you can rotate any combination of sides ( view orthographicly, [#5] from standard directions [1,3,7] when rotating,) and/or use the transform tool [n] to make sure only one axis is turning at one time.
And of course to pick up and move the whole thing, just pick up the empty.

Ric,

Thanks for the reply, but I guess I might be confused on how it would work with only one empty. If you parent all the cubes to the one empty, then when you applied a transform to the empty, it would affect all the cubes. So looking at one face of the cube and only wanting to rotate the right face (9 cubes on the right side), while keeping the other 18 cubes stationary, I don’t think you could accomplish this with only one empty.

A simple search for rubik revealed the following

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=54588

Thanks for the pointer - I’ll give rigging a shot.