Week 7: Rigging/Kinematics - Set Driven Keys

Wrapping up this week we covered the last of the constraints, Set Driven Keys. For artist who aren't so versed in coding in MEL (or don't care to be), this was of visually constraining one objects value to another's is a godsend. That's the long and short of it really...we are telling Maya that when object 'A' is in this position or state, put object 'B' (or C, D or as many as like) in that position or state. You can even use Set Driven to connect an object's value to a slider control that appears in the work area so making a mouth open/close, wing flap is really easy.

In the screencap above, I wired the rotations of the joints of a hand to the position of crosshair's position. Moving the crosshair from left to right causes the joints to rotate and the hand closes. Then wired the positon of the locator to the slider I made called 'Grip' so just changing that value makes the same action. Having this kind of east control allows animators to focus on animating and not on finding objects in the scene and speeds up their workflow.