Can animation nodes be used for animating a rubik's cube?

Question

First of all, wat an awesome adon I made a Rubik's cube and was wondering: can it be used to randomly scramble the cube? And how would i do the parenting to 6 empty's i placed around the cube.

I tried to do the parenting based on XYZ position of the origin point of the small cubes I have split all cube locations into 6 lists(-X, +X, -Y, +Y, -Z, +Z) Does anybody have an idea how i get those cubes to behave nicely and stay in the cube after 1 turn? And can the logic nodes or scripting node be used to do some 'smart' parenting based on > if a empty is rotating or selected? Would it be better to make an armature and animate that?

Any hints,tips and tricks are welcome :)

Answer 1

It needs some work but possible. You can try using Child of constraints, to dynamically parent the cubes to empties as time going. Here is an example setup:

Also, you can try using particles to generate location set. Like this:

Both solutions are a bit tricky, and not perfect, still figuring out how to fix that, but that's how it goes for now.