LogInAmaresh Beuria shows off his skills.
Rubik's Cube is a fascinating toy, especially when you know how to rig it in 3D. Amaresh Beuria certainly does, as you can see in his new project made with Maya.
"While working on a personal project, I stumbled upon the Unreal Fest 2023 video by Chase Cooper where he teases the new Dynamic Hierarchy feature introduced in Control Rig with a Rubik's Cube. ... I thought, let's try to do this by replicating the dynamic hierarchy setup in Maya."
Amaresh Beuria
Beuria shared a breakdown of the project, so if you want to recreate it, feel free.
First, he downloaded a Rubik's Cube model and wrote a Python script for it. He set up the rig by creating joints for each of the 26 cube pieces, all parented under a root joint. These joints were then skin-bound to their respective cube pieces. He also created nine controls, three for each of the rotation axis planes.
For functionality, he ran a script job that responded to selection changes. When a control was selected, a function gathered all the bones within that control’s rotation plane. These bones were then parented to the selected control, allowing the Cube's face to rotate with the control’s rotation.
"This is not keyable yet as the dynamic hierarchy setup is not as flexible as the control rig in UE. So the only way to make these controls keyable would be to use a bit of matrix math. I tried a few setups, but it doesn't give me the exact flexibility I'm looking for.
"I've already spent a whole day on this, so it's time to finally do it in Unreal Engine, and I'll maybe revisit this later when I learn more about Matrix math."
If you like this work, check out Aldo Aldrich's similar rig and Gabriel Domingues's cool projectile VFX.
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