Hello All

I am very new to Blender, and 3d modeling in general for that matter so bear with me.

I am trying to animate a Rubiks cube and i am running into an issue with parenting. when i group the top layer of the cube to do a rotation around the center blocks pivot point it animates correctly. but when i try to remove the parent to attempt to move a vertical side, the top layer only animates the center cube between the original key frames.

I am aware of something called soft parenting in Maya which allows you to parent separately in between animations without destroying the original animation.

Is there something like this in Blender?

A Rubik’s cube consists of 26 pieces, right?

Create 26 empties, all positioned at the centre of the cube. Parent one piece to each empty.

Now you can apply any rotations you like to each empty, and the corresponding piece will follow along.

Of course there are no automatic constraints on the movements of adjacent pieces—it will be up to you to keep that consistent.

I found that if I select one side as a group and set the pivot point to the 3d cursor placed at the center of the cube, i was able to get it to animate somewhat correctly.

The individual cubes were moving as a group but as the rotation went through they would all converge on the center slightly halfway through the move and reassemble correctly at the end.

the only way i could fix this was to keyframe every 2 rotations so that it was forced to follow the path that i wanted.

I tried just 3 keyframes (beginning, middle, end) to see if it would work but the cubes still converged although less than before.

is there anyway to force objects to make the literal move that i make in the object window between keyframes?

i tried keframing multiple different ways (visual, etc) but couldnt get it to work out.

its kinda tedious to animate each side as if it were stop motion hahaha

Use empties positioned at the centre, like I said.