Rubik’s Cube Animation

The goal of this project was to create a simple looping animation to post on my Instagram account. I chose the Rubik’s Cube as a fun, relatable subject.

Art Direction, Design, and Animation: Salem Pierce

I began with vector mockups to develop block my layout and develop the color palette. Instead of the standard palette of primary and secondary colors, I chose softer pastel colors on a purple base.

Once I modeled the cube in Blender, I started working on materials. From the beginning, I wanted to use a cel-shaded style but I explored a few other options before developing a satisfactory cel-shading setup.

The cube is animated at 12 frames per second to give the feel of hand-drawn animation. Once the animation was complete I set up the lighting and rendered it out to video.