Creating an Animated Grid of Rotating Cubes with Drivers in Blender

Today, I've been learning how to create an array of rotating cubes in Blender using Python. The goal was to automate the setup with Drivers, adding rotation offsets and color variations to make the animation resemble the demo effects in the demoscene in the early 90s.

This approach allows the animation to be both procedural and dynamic without having to set up any keyframes. It allows for unique motion for each cube in the array.

Initializing the Scene

1. Remove all existing objects
2. Set the animation length
3. Configure the renderer
4. Set the animation frame rate (FPS)
5. Define the output file format as a video
6. Establish variables for the number of rows, columns, and spacing between objects

Creating a Material Method

7. Define a function to create materials
8. Allow inputs for name and color, making it assignable at runtime

Generating the Array of Cubes and Assigning Properties

9. Use a nested loop where each row iteration contains multiple column iterations
10. Create cubes within the loop
11. Assign a color based on the row index
12. Apply material (using the previously defined method) with the assigned color values
13. Set up animation properties

Applying Rotation in the Loop

14. Rotate each cube along all axes
15. Apply an offset to each rotation based on the frame count

Configuring Lights and Camera

16. Set up and position lights
17. Adjust and position the camera

Here is how it looks:

A continued experiment with sinusoidal movement: