BCON22 - Animating the Default Cube

During the Blender Conference 2022 I had the opportunity to share some animation experience with the blender community and perform a bit of live animation in the classroom.

With animation being a rather tedious and time consuming job I chose to narrow down the scope of detail to a bare minimum, while still being able to show some cool animation tests within an hour and avoid spending the entire time on animating a single blink.

Here you can watch the intro I recorded in Blender to make the introduction for the Blender conference 2022.

Since the default cube is the most deleted, rejected and misunderstood item in Blender, I decided to take on the challenge of making a character out of it. Not only because of time constraints but also to demonstrate that character animation is possible with almost everything when you implement the right ingredients, referring to the twelve principles of animation.

Not all of us are working at a major animation studio or don't have the gear to run realistic human characters in real time. I try to show that you don’t require the most advanced, high-end rig to generate a story with a solid character performance.

I started the workshop by showing different versions of a jumping cube while pushing the squash and stretch principle.

I explored different walks to show how a simple cube can communicate different emotions through posture, pacing and speed. Check out the video below.

I animated all tests with a rigged cube (rig provided by Demeter Dzadik) that allows me to create the performances as shown in the videos. What started out as an inside joke has developed in a true journey to give the default cube its respect and honor as it deserves. I hope you enjoy the video amongst other great talks on the Blender youtube channel.

Curious if you can bring this cube to life with your imagination and animation skills? Let’s free the cube together! Try it out for yourself and we’d love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share your tests on social media with #defaultcube. Download the cube rig along with some animation included down below.