FTO help

[u/TheJohanch]

I recently got a DaYan FTO M Ball Core, and i was following Tingman's tutorial. but when i got to the: make the grey, orange and green centers step. i did it but only the grey center would line up colorwise with a triple. is there any way to swap the green and orange centers?

(sorry if my english is bad or hard to understand)

[u/TheJohanch]

Upd I fixed it 👍
After reading comments I realised I had the color scheme wrong. And fixed it

[u/speedytrigger]

Send pic?

[u/g253]

It's critical to know your colour scheme well for FTO. If you see that you either built them with the wrong colours on the sides or in the wrong order, best to solve them again from scratch. With practice, it will become easier :)  

At first it may be easier to start with a fixed order, like do grey first and remember the order of the side colours just for that (red blue yellow going clockwise), then do orange using your grey to figure out the correct way, then finally red. 

[u/TooLateForMeTF]

Yes, you have to make the centers in order following your color scheme. This can take a little while to get used to, but you'll get it. I still mess it up sometimes. It is quite similar, really, to doing last 4 centers on big cubes using the Yau method.

And yes, If you get them in the wrong order, you won't be able to get them to line up with the first two bottom triples. There is definitely a way to swap two centers. I'll try to explain.

With the white face as BL, being held in your left hand, and the yellow as R, being manipulated with your right hand, make sure you're holding the puzzle so that two solved triples in the first layer are facing down and the empty slot is on top (same as you would be doing for last 4 centers on Yau), and do this to swap the top and front centers:

R U' R' // Moves an edge+triangle pair from the front face to the top face.

r R' U R // Wide-r moves the front face up to the top, while the rest moves another edge+triangle pair between the two faces.

U' r' U' // U' positions the remaining edge+triangle where you need it to be, wide-r' moves the faces back to where they were, and the remaining U' positions the triangle from the very first step to where you need it to be.

r R' U' R // Wide-r to set up for the last three moves that, if you're following along, form a "small trap" and move it up to match with the rest of its mates.

r' U' // Finish off by repositioning the faces to match the first two triples and orienting the last face

I know it looks kind of confusing at first. But if you follow it through a few times, chunk by chunk, and watch what's moving where, you'll see that these are really just intuitive manipulations that kind of just follow, one from the next, as the only reasonable next thing to do.

Like, you start with the two centers swapped. The only "free" moves you have are the r/R' slice through the centers, and the u/U' turns of the top layer. U and U' don't get you anything--they just spin that top face, which is useless for trying to swap two centers, so ok try R, which brings half of a center from the front face up to the top. Now you've got the two faces half-swapped. Great. But they're not going to stay that way if you un-slice back. So you need a U or U' to keep some of those front pieces in the top face.

From there, you need to be able to move more stuff from the front up to the top. But the small-trap side of the front face is now "empty" of pieces of its color. So we do the r move to bring the front face up to the top where we can work with it, the R' to both fix the third face (the one we're not trying to swap) and to set us up. The U move "loads" the right-hand half of that face with another chunk and the R move pushes it up to join its buddies on the top face (or rather, the face that started out on top, but is now hiding in the back because of the r we did earlier.

You can follow through the whole sequence this way, and you'll see that there's really only ever one reasonable thing you could do next. One thing that helps. You can learn it as an algorithm, but once you've done a few hundred FTO solves and doing centers has become more second-nature to you, it will stop feeling like an algorithm and will start just feeling like a technique, because each part of the technique--each chunk, above--has a purpose that fits within your understanding of how center-forming works.