Lars Vandenbergh's CubeZone Speedcubing taken one step further

ImageCube

A PHP script for generating static 3D views of the 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube

ImageCube is a PHP script I wrote for generating static images of the 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube. It can be used for building websites explaining methods or for illustrating certain move sequences. The main advantages of it are that:

• It generates a standard PNG image with a transparent background that can be viewed in any web browser. It doesn't use Java, JavaScript or any type of client side scripting.
• You can set up cases on a cube very easily. The examples below were all made in a matter of seconds. It's just a matter of entering the colors of the stickers.
• It's very light-weight since it's only a PNG image that is generated. A lot of web sites use 3D Java cubes which look nice and are very useful but that are also quite demanding in terms of page load time and computing power. For situations where having a complete 3D view isn't necessary, this script gives you a good alternative.

Examples

Example 1: Illustrating the CFOP system

Scrambled cube	Cross solved	F2L solved	F2L + OLL solved	Cube solved

Example 2: Various sizes

50x50 pixels	75x75 pixels	100x100 pixels	150x150 pixels	200x200 pixels

Example 3: Ignoring parts of the cube

Only showing cross + pair	Insert final pair and orient edges	Only showing corners

How to use it

The images above are all generated by imagecube.php. This script accepts two input paramters:

• stickers: this is a 27 character string describing the stickers of the visible part of the cube. It will first describe the U face, then the F face and finally the R face. The stickers are described in "reading order", which means from the top left to the bottom right as you look at it. The symbols used are:
  • r: for red
  • o: for orange
  • g: for green
  • b: for blue
  • w: for white
  • y: for yellow
  • x: for grey
• size: this is the size (width and height) of the image in pixels. If you don't include this parameter, the script will just take 200 pixels as the size.

So to generate a cube with the F2L solved, like the one shown above, one could use:

Source code

• Soure code in text format: This is the original PHP code of ImageCube. If your want to use ImageCube on your website, feel free to do so. If your web server supports PHP and you want to make extensive use of my script, I advice you to copy the contents of this text file in a php-file and link your images to it. Keep in mind that this PHP script uses the GD image library, so you will have to check if your web server supports it and has it enabled.

This page is maintained by Lars Vandenbergh

Last update on 6th August 2011