OpenGL · C++Computer GraphicsUCSP Course Project

OpenGL — Interactive Rubik's Cube

A fully interactive 3D Rubik's Cube rendered in real-time with OpenGL, featuring keyboard-controlled face rotations, camera navigation, and a seismic shake animation.

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Overview

Built for the Computer Graphics course at Universidad Católica San Pablo (UCSP), this project implements a fully interactive Rubik's Cube entirely in C++ and OpenGL — no game engine. The core challenge was managing the 3D state of 27 individual cubelets and rotating entire face slices while maintaining correct orientation tracking.

Core Systems

Real-time 3D rendering with OpenGL — vertices, shaders, and transformation matrices managed manually
Face rotation logic: identifying the 9 cubelets belonging to each face and applying a shared rotation matrix
Quaternion-based orientation tracking to avoid gimbal lock during combined rotations
Camera navigation with mouse input — orbit around the cube in all directions
Seismic/shake animation triggered by keyboard shortcut
Full keyboard mapping for all 6 face rotations (CW and CCW)

What I Learned

This project required a deep understanding of 3D transformations from first principles — no engine abstractions. Managing the parent-child transform relationships between 27 cubelets during a face rotation was the most challenging part, as the rotation had to be applied in world space while preserving each cubelet's relative position within the cube.