A quick video tutorial showing how to set up custom properties on armature bones to use as drivers to control other settings in Blender. By assigning a custom property to a bone in pose mode, a control will appear in the transform panel in the 3d view when the bone is selected in pose mode. This property can be used to control anything that a driver can be assign to in Blender. The video shows how I set it up to control visibility/rendering of a mesh object, controlling a shape key, and setting the influence of a constraint. By using this simple method, you can quickly control settings that you might otherwise have to search thru panels to find the setting and key frame them, speeding up the animation work flow greatly.
Feel free to ask any questions and see the attached .blend file.
Uhm.. Custom Properties and Drivers.. I have a very unpopular opinion about them.
I think they are something .. that has been useful when Blender hadn’t geometry nodes or the aspiration to become a real procedural tool.
They have too many limitations: drivers are linked to specific data blocks (so a true procedural workflow is impossible) and custom properties are… .. … so meager and sad.
I create 100 objects with 5 custom properties.. then I need a sixth (or delete one of them).. and… I have to manually do it for all 100 objects (python, addons, whatever: it’s not what I NEED)
This is .. really useless and painful when you need a real procedural workflow.
The truth is that geonodes are the only future for a modern and efficient (procedural) Blender. We need the possibility to link - everything - with - anything - (shader/compositor/geonodes) without those .. “escamotages” (like you can do in Houdini - the only 100% full procedural 3d application at the moment - )
