animating multiple rotating objects
 

I'm trying to animate a rubik's cube. When I rotate a slice (9 cube pieces) and make the keyframes all is fine. But then when i rotate another slice which happens to contain a cube piece that was in the previous animation everything goes weird. I can rotate and make the keyframes, but when i go through the animation some of the pieces act strangely, for example if i rotate the whole slice only in the x dimension, I notice some of the pieces rotate a bit in y and z as well for no apparant reason. I've tried it with grouping the pieces as well as just selecting a bunch and moving them at once and the same thing happens. Even when I do each piece individually it seems to happen.

You could try deleting the history at the start of the animation, that might work............dave

Check in your graph editor to see how the curves are behaving at the points where you notice unwanted rotation. You might have to modify the tangents. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but I have a suspicion it has to do with a combination of the tangents and rotation in a local axis, which gets converted to global rotation with messy numbers. Hope that helps.

Thats gimbal lock, apply a Euler filter to your animation, that should get rid of the locking but im not sure animating a rubicks cubeis technically possible with a Euler system. I did something symilar but its quite complex to set up.