Dynamic parenting

[SiFly]

Is there a way to turn parenting on and off in the time line or using a script without using a plug in. I'm trying to create a rubiks cube as a practice project. I'm a total noob to after effects so apologies if this is an age old question.

I have created 26 cubes and arranged them in the shape of a Rubik's cube but I want to make the Center cube on each face of the main cube the parent only when that particular face is being rotated. So the parent/child relation is dynamic.

I have seen the 'Good Parent' plug could possibly do what I need but wondered if this was possible natively in After Effects.

thank you in advance.

Si

[Digital Twigs]

It's a good question and I'd love to see a way to natively keyframe toggle on and off parenting for layers in future updates.

The way around this would be to create a control null for each face that can be rotated independently from the others. You can then parent each of those nulls to a master control if you need to, but isolating each row or face rotation to its own control null would be the way to go.

[Mylenium]

You need to rig this one way or the other, regardless whether you use a script or not. AE doesn't have dynaic constraints and in case of a Rubik's cube the various combinations are so complex that you may need a chain of four or five Nulls parented to each other to even rotate a single face without the structure falling apart. That and of course you'd still need to bake some of the rotations into keyframes after a while or else this becomes unmanagable. After all, it's billions of theoretical combinations and there's just no way to keep track of this after about ten rotations. So if you in any way can afford to spend those 30 bucks, just do it.

Mylenium

[SiFly]

Thank you for your reply. I’ll probably build this in Cinema 4D and tweak it in After Effects.

[Mylenium]

Same issue, though. Can't defeat the math.

Mylenium