Floating Cats and 3D Cubes

I couldn't wait to have some "free" time so I could add styling to my project. Something about a little bit of interactivity adds life to the page.

You want a floating cat? No problem. I made an image of a cat using AI and extracted the background in Illustator "by hand" to get a nice cut-out effect for my .png image. Bam. Cat.

Lets make him move a little bit so it looks like he's floating. One of my favorite CSS animations is orbit. It is really useful and you can do a lot with it.

---

Cat

In the view, I bring the image of my cat in and assign it the class "cat"

<%= image_tag "favicon.png", alt:"vendor booth", width:"40%", height:"40%", class:"cat" %>

Now, in my css file, I build my style for "cat". In cat, we call our animation, orbit, as shown below.

.cat {
  animation: orbit 3s infinite linear;
}

@keyframes orbit {
  from {
    transform: rotate(0deg) translateX(15px) rotate(0deg);
  }
  to {
    transform: rotate(360deg) translateX(15px) rotate(-360deg);
  }
} 

You see here that we are "rotating the cat starting at an angle of 0 degrees", at 15px away from the x-origin, starting at 0 degrees.

The cat goes a full circle to 360 degrees, at 15px away, all the way around. The second rotation of -360 is canceling out the first rotation, to keep the cat upright. It's easier if you just see the animation. XD.

We are just moving him a tiny amount, as we don't want him flying all over the page. Just enough to be exciting.

A little bit to the left,



A little bit to the right.

Magic!

---

Cube

I had previously learned how to create a cube with css. While that's fine and dandy, I got the wild hair idea today about re-using the cube in a dynamic way. I wanted to populate the cube faces with data in real time. Like say, the next few upcoming events. As like a fun discovering thing on the landing page. Why not. This is exciting.

So as anything, I build out the skeleton in the view. Our cube needs a home after all.

I've got some radio buttons so the user can interact with the cube.

Each radio button will show a different cube face.

I add the information I want to display on each face in a loop:

  <div class="cube-container">
      <input class="radio-button" type="radio" name="cube-gallery" checked/>
      <input class="radio-button" type="radio" name="cube-gallery"/>
      <input class="radio-button" type="radio" name="cube-gallery"/>
      <input class="radio-button" type="radio" name="cube-gallery"/>
      <input class="radio-button" type="radio" name="cube-gallery"/>
      <input class="radio-button" type="radio" name="cube-gallery"/>
        <div class="cube">
        <% upcoming_events = Event.where('started_at > ?', Date.today).order(:started_at).limit(6) %>
        <% upcoming_events.each do |event| %>
          <div class="cube-side intro col">
            <p><% if event.photo.present? %>
                <%= image_tag url_for(event.photo), width: "75px", height: "75px", alt: "default photo" %>
                <% else %>
                <%= image_tag "bulb.png", width: "75px", height: "75px", alt: "default photo" %>
              <% end %>
            </p>
            <p><%= link_to event.name, event_path(event.id) %></p>
            <p><%= event.started_at.strftime("%A, %B %d, %Y") %></p>
          </div>
        <% end %>
      </div>
    </div>

---

Handling the css is a bit of a dance. Especially with viewports and what not. This is not the answer for mobile but it will work and be functional on a bigger screen, LOL. I'm just gonna leave this here for you. Open to suggestions for handling a small screen size.

---

/*===========
rotating cube
==============*/

.cube-container {
  width: 30vw;
  height: 40vh;
  text-align: center;
  perspective: 100em;    
}

.cube {
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  position: relative;
  transform-style: preserve-3d;
  transition-duration: 2s;
  border: 5px solid transparent;  
  margin-top:100px; 
  display: block;
}

.cube-side {
  position: absolute;
  width: 300px;
  height: 300px;
  background-color: rgb(64, 0, 148);
  border: 1px solid white;
  background-position: center;
  background-size: cover;
  border: 4px solid lime;
}

.cube-side:nth-child(1){
  transform: rotateY(0deg) translateZ(10em);
}

.cube-side:nth-child(2){
  transform: rotateY(90deg) translateZ(10em);
}

.cube-side:nth-child(3){
  transform: rotateY(180deg) translateZ(10em);
}

.cube-side:nth-child(4){
  transform: rotateY(-90deg) translateZ(10em);
}

.cube-side:nth-child(5){
  transform: rotateX(90deg) translateZ(9.75em);
  border-top: 8px solid lime;
  border-bottom: 8px solid lime;
}

.cube-side:nth-child(6){
  transform: rotateX(-90deg) translateZ(9.3em);
  border-top: 8px solid lime;
  border-bottom: 8px solid lime;
}


/* cube radio buttons */

.radio-button {
  transform: translateX(-50px);
}

.radio-button:checked ~ .cube{
  transition-duration: 3s;
  transition-timing-function: cubic-bezier(0.19. 1, 0.22, 1);
}

.radio-button:nth-child(1):checked ~ .cube {
  transform: rotateX(-15deg) rotateY(20deg);
}

.radio-button:nth-child(2):checked ~ .cube {
  transform: rotateX(-15deg) rotateY(180deg);
}

.radio-button:nth-child(3):checked ~ .cube {
  transform: rotateX(-15deg) rotateY(90deg);
}

.radio-button:nth-child(4):checked ~ .cube {
  transform: rotateX(-15deg) rotateY(-90deg);
}

.radio-button:nth-child(5):checked ~ .cube {
  transform: rotateX(-105deg) rotateY(0deg);
}

.radio-button:nth-child(6):checked ~ .cube {
  transform: rotateX(75deg) rotateY(0deg);
}

Each button and side is being handled individually. I'd love to see a more elegant solution if it exists.

I'm just really excited it worked.

Thanks for looking!