Orestis Konstantinidis Cobbles Together a Dynamic Pivot in C4D to Animate a Rolling Cube.
Animating rotations — It’s a simple as picking an axis and setting a key, well sort-of. There are varying degrees of complexity. For example, animating a rotating wheel is pretty straightforward, but how about creating a system that will dynamically rotate a wheel when you pull an object like a car through a scene? How about rolling a cube? A dynamic pivot would be great for that.
Cinema 4D Artist Orestis Konstantinidis shows how to can rotate a cube on a ground plane using a Xpresso rig. First, though, Orestis explains how you might approach the problem without using a rig. It quickly becomes pretty clear manual effort isn’t the best solution for something like this. What you need is a dynamic pivot, one you can move to assist you to roll and rotate the cube to your heart’s content. The tutorial does get a bit nerdy with Xpresso nodes and some maths, with a bonus sighting of Modulo.
