Driven Keys and Armature question

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I have made a character that uses driven keys to control the blinking of the eyes. For the blinking I have made a shape key of the eyelids closing and I used a Lattice deformer with a shape animation for a squash and stretch effect. The shape key IPO for the eyelids has a driver and and the shape animation for the lattice has a driver, from here everything works. Now what I really want to do is use a bone from my armature as the driver, but only a regular object seems to work since you can only specify 1 object to be the driver and no “sub” objects (the bone) like you can with the constraints. The setup works with the seperate objects as the drivers, and I have tried using a Scale contstraint (since “Scale Z” controlls the curves) on the seperate objects and the controll bones in the armature but it doesnt work. Somehow the scale contstraint deforms the object without changing the scale values, so nothing happens to the driven IPO’s.

I really need the blinking controlls inside the armature since I want al of the animations in one action and not scattered over different IPO’s and control objects.

P.S. The character I’m making is for a client so I cant post a blender file.

2

If I understand you correctly, what you need to do is put the armature’s name in the Object field for the IPO driver, then select Pose for the driver type (from the little menu that currently says Object). Now a BO: field will appear where you can specify a bone from your armature as the driver.

3

Thank you thats it :smiley: I must have missed it, the pull down only appears when you have an armature object for a driver.

MadMesh