Driven shape keys and control set-ups are well known in animation and a vital tool for any animator dealing with something as simple as eye movements to more complex facial expressions. This type of system has been available in Blender for a while and has been used to great effect by advanced users of Blender (see the Ludwig rig).
Now the Blender User Manual has instructions on how to implement your own Driven Shape Keys and control set-ups. The lesson is fairly short, demonstrating that something so easy to implement can grant a user extensive control over an animation.
2 Comments
Driven shape keys are nice, but.... there is a design issue : ist's hard to use with multiple scenes ( let's say unusefull) because they are linked to the mesh.
So, if you have 2 linked meshes in 2 different scenes, and you want 2 different animations, you can not use driven keys, because 1 driver affects all the linked meshes.
Of course, you can duplicate data blocs... but it's so cool to work with linked data.
Aaah, finally some sort of tutorial on Drivers...