TUTORIAL: How To Animate A Cube In Houdini

Anyone can animate a character acting – just move around the controllers on the arms and eyes a bit and boom, you’ve instantly created a beloved performance that’ll be remembered by your grandchildren’s children.

But a cube, an honest-to-goodness rigid cube with six entirely different sides, now that’s a different story. There’s no arms or face to make the animator’s job easy. A cube is the pure essence of animation, the truest test of an animator’s skill – a magnificent multi-faced inanimate object that requires real imagination to believably move across the screen. If you can animate this stately and majestic creature, you know you’ve earned an honest paycheck.

In this Houdini tutorial, master cube animator Anatolii Iudanov shows how to animate one of these beasts. For those who feel ambitious, download the raw project files here and try creating your own Cubist masterpiece.