Help Needed With Animating A Rubik

[jtburns]

The past few months I have been doing a lot of searching to find an easy way to animate a Rubiks cube without using a lot of Mel script, and one that is not to terribly complicated. I have found many posts on various forums where the author of the thread asked how to make a rig for easy selection and animation of the cube. However, these topics all focused around the making of a complicated Mel rig to animate with and this approach is of little help to me. In my situation the use of such a complicated rig that requires pages of Mel script is not doable for me. Im wondering if there is a simple way to animate a Rubiks cube.
Here is my situation

Objective: I am working on a video animation that will show a Rubiks cube lift off the ground, hover in space, solve its self and explode into its 54 faces.

Constraints: I will not be allowed to use a rig that I did not create and I will not be allowed to use a rig that is heavily based on Mel script. (Some Mel maybe acceptable but not preferred)

Problems I have encountered: The way I started my cube was to move the pivot point of each of the 27 pieces of the cube to the exact center the cube. After this I froze the transformations for the whole cube. At this point in time the Z axis is facing the front of the cube, the Y axis is vertical through the center of the cube and the X axis is horizontal through center of the cube for all 27 of the cubes pieces. After this I will rotate one side, lets call it the red side, of the cube 90 degrees in Z and key it. After I rotated red side 90 degrees in Z I proceeded to rotate blue side -90 degrees in X. Here is where all the trouble starts. The three pieces that are now common, after red was rotated 90 degrees in Z, now flip out, rotating in all three axis instead of just Y. This causes these pieces to roll out of alignment with the side they now belong to.

Now I believe I know the reason for this. When the first side was rotated all three of the axis for those 9 pieces flipped so now Y is horizontal and X is vertical. So the axis do not match up for the blue side and when you select that side and rotate -90 in Y maya just makes a best guest of what happens between the two key frames and thats where the flipping out is coming from. If I can get the axis to stay constant I believe this method should work. However, my search for a solution to this problem has revealed nothing related to solving these errors.

Questions: I can break it down to a few questions.
1. Is it actually possible to animate a Rubiks cube without using a heavy Mel script rig?
2. Is there a way to set it so that when I rotate an object it does not rotate the local axis along with it?
3. Is there any other way to animate a Rubiks cube without the use

[joojaa]

Actually a rubics cube is very simple to animate. And set up.

Just make a bunch of cubes in a array that forms a rubics cube. then place all their pivots to the center of yoru cube. Keyframe all cubes and set rotation interpolation fo teh curves to quats. (if you neglect this step your cube WILL break)

Then just key in the groups and animate forward (once youve set a step you can NOT GO BACK without having to redo all you do after this) by placing linear rotations in world space (so make sure your default tangent type is linear, and rotate tool in world space, Also you need to keyframe all cubes at each step so you wont go of sync, and never rotate more than 90 degrees. Tip: make a character set. Warning its VERY easy to do a mistake so THATs why its best to build simple scripting supports).

As for need of mel scripts well you can not get anything doen in maya without mel scripts, since the whole GUI is a mel script but yes you dont to wirte any scripts.

QUOTE
1. Is it actually possible to animate a Rubiks cube without using a heavy Mel script rig?

Yes, assuming that you mean by melscripting not needing to write one. As i said its NOT possible to do ANYTHING in maya without mel scripts. So in way its not actually possible. BUt assuming your scope of thinking then yes.

QUOTE
2. Is there a way to set it so that when I rotate an object it does not rotate the local axis along with it?

No that's how eulers work, but using quat interpolation solves the problem as the eulers set the end orientation but maya interpolates then the shortest way between theese points. Wich is what you want.

But yes it is possible to do the interpolation manually too.

QUOTE
3

Well you should stop thinking that the scripting language is a must its a may thing you may do it. If you wouldnt then maya would suck big time, and frankly be near useless.