C4D Rubiks Cube Animation

How to create and animate a Rubik’s Cube in Cinema 4D using a setting you’ve probably never used before!

It seems like it would be really easy to do, but it’s a bit tricky..

First we tried using mograph effectors, but that didn’t work.

Then we got it kinda working with some over complex Parent Constraints, but that just wasn’t practical.

But then we stumbled onto a setting we’d never used before which was the key to the effect!

We were actually able to animate the twisting blocks by hand by firstly centering the axis of each block to the center of the Rubik’s cube itself, then using the little known setting called quaternion rotation, we were able to twist the blocks any which way we needed, just like a real Rubik’s cube!

And for a little bit of springy movement, we added a Track Modifier to make things look a bit more interesting.

This tutorial was requested by Shruti (one of our awesome Members) who needed to create a Rubiks Cube for an infographics project she was working on in Cinema 4D.

We built the tutorial and project file for her to use, and she was thankfully able to get the job out on time!