Hi everyone, I am looking for a little help/advice, I really hope this makes sense, its quite hard to explain. Over the last few days ive been setting up a face rigg controller for my character, and I would like to be able to setup a single control bone that drives a group of mouth and cheek controllers (bones on the face rigg controller), this will be done to automatically create a smile, using a single controller. This is possible, however the only thing is I can no-longer manually move these mouth and cheek controllers once i assign the driver to them.
My question is, is there anyway to manually move bones that have been setup with a driver, as I would like to use both, my smile controller, that moves all the controllers needed to create the smile, and the individual face controllers.
The typical solution to this is to make the driven bones a child of a bone with no constraints or vertex weights (essentially an empty, but in the form of a bone). This way you can manually control the bone while manipulating the parent bone or control the child bones through manipulating their controller. Then you can hide the “mechanic bones” (the driven ones) on a separate layer to have a simple and functional rig. Best of luck!
Thank you for the reply, however im having a really hard time understanding how to do this. I did try to parent the face controller to an empty, but i still had the same issue of not being able to move the face controller bones manually.
This should not be the case, I attached an image illustrating how when you select the cube directly (which has drivers applied to its location) it does not allow you to move it, but when you select the empty that the cube is a child of, you can freely move it around.
any property channel with a driver on it cannot be modified further, except through the very thing that drives it. What you want to do is either :
select every bone with a driver, duplicate them, and parent the originals to the duplicates. Then remove the driver on the original, it will serve as the actual control but will be taken along by its parent who still has the driver on it.
use constraints instead of drivers - for example the transformation constraint or the action constraint can be of help - and you don’t need to create duplicate bones
