Hi there…
This is a frame of a simple camera animation around a rubik’s cube. So far, so good. my problem is how to easily animate the natural behaviour of that cube. meaning rotating the sides. can anybody tell me how to do that? parenting doesn’t help, because some small cubes would have more than one parent, and that is not possible.
mayby that’s a good example of why blender needs grouping! 
bye flo
I would think it shou;dn’t be too hard to rotate by switching your rotate styles a bit. Hope this helps:
http://www.blender.org/modules/documentation/htmlI/x2167.html
IMHO I think it looks great cant wait for the finished result.
I did an animation of a rubiks cube not too long ago. Animating a rubiks cube is a puzzle in itsself.
The approach tat I ended up with was locking the position and rotation of all the cubes. Though, you will run into problems of blocks grouping togeather and not folowing their path. This is a flaw in many programe and not just blender.
I ended up saving before I added keyframes each time I rotated a layer and then seeing if the wierd rotation showed up or not. If it showed up I would open the saved blend and rotate another set of blocks untill I found one that worked at that particular point in time.
My animation can be found in the o9studios demo reel at
www.o9studios.com
Hope this helps
-steve
I animated a Rubik cube with an armature. Create an armature with bones emanating from the center of the cube, with the ends at each of the small cubes. Then select groups of nine, and animate.
Worked pretty well – a couple of stills from an animation are up at www.princeton.edu/~mplough/gallery.html
Good luck with this–
Matt
oh man! I still don’t get it! I think the bones version is the most suitable, but i get the same problem: I create a star out of nine bones. when i parent the cubes to the armature, one cube can only have one bone as parent! please tell me exactly how you do it. heres a screenshot:
bye droddl
I think what was meant was that you need a bone for every cube (A total of 26!), and you select a group of 8 (centre) or 9 (face) of bones to rotate…
I personally don’t see how this is different from just using the cubes the same way.
Now, here’s my suggestion, and it may seem a little weird at first, but I think it should work, and nicely too:
Every cube should have its centre at the centre of the whole.
Why?
Rotation on a per-axis basis. You only need to modify one IPO of each cube being rotated in order for it to rotate around the center of the Rubik’s. You can use axis constraints (X, Y, Z keys) on a local basis to manipulate them in real time as well. See how much sense it makes? Select a group of cubes, hit R, select your axis, and start rotating. Magic!
fudje’s solution is simple and effective. But I’m curious if somebody posts a solution based on an armature.
Rubik’s Cube is really fascinating - I still got one.
Okay okay…
Thanks for all your replies, but how exactly can i move every cubes centre to the centre of the whole? These are the little things i don’t know in blender, but i need them soo often. 
Is it really that i have to move every cube to the centre and go to edit mode and move every cube’s vertices to the final position?
There is a minor problem with my solution, and that is that you cannot use border select on it (border select works on the centre of objects, and they’re all in the same place, see?), so lots of tricky shift clicking. Using an armature (exactly the same way) would effectively eliminate this problem…
BTW: Border selecting works fine! It uses the edges, not the centres! So works fine! that works fine. but how can i animate it? I select 9 cubes and rotate it along an axis, but all i get is weird rotations! I’m so helpless!!!
Heh dude…
it’s my old project… i did it about 2 months ago . I show you how it should work… Regards
?
And when will you show me? Why the sad smilie? I really don’t clearly get what you’re trying to tell me!
I did the same … rubic cube is rubic cube…they look almost like clones:).
[quote=“droddl”]And when will you show me? When you wish:)
Okay! Tzhen show me how you animated the cube!
It is different. You see, armatures use quaternion interpolation for their rotation IPOs, not Euler interpolation. That means that you get more accurate keying, and (theoretically) no strange rotations. However, a bug cropped up in 2.26 because of another bugfix; it may give you some odd rotations.
Matt