So our recent project was to create a hard surface model then rig up the model using set driven keys. In the past i have played around with set driven key expressions. Using small script to drive one object's attributes with another object.

Using set driven key this time round was a lot easier than creating little expressions it was just a matter of going through the key menu and selecting the objects and attributes to drive and be driven. This method was more efficient than my previous experiments with set driven key.

For this project I decided to create a little ball drone that unfolds in various ways, unfolding and opening to be able to walk, pack, and fly.

These movements are simple enough on their own, but i had trouble trying to figure out the correct hierarchy and parenting order to be able to have all of these modes work independently and be able to work as a whole and be able to move all the pieces as a single unit.

I wasted a lot of time trying to sort through this problem of the correct chaining order. I tried blending parent constraints, straight up parenting and parenting to different objects with a mix of set driven keys driving different parts of the mesh. The hassle I had was when I set the driven keys for one part of the animation it would mess with previously set keys.

Got it all working eventually when i took a step back and went about it as if rigging a character, where i started at the base or the “root” of the hierarchy then slowly worked outward.

So I created a master nurbs curve that the mesh was parented to. With the master curve I created a series of custom attributes that were the drivers for the set driven keys.

Before I had the drone rigged up in this fashion I had the set driven keys being driven from different parts of the geometry which was screwing up with with the overall parenting.