Converting to Driven Keys

[kuro-maku]

Hello, first of all happy new year to all.

I'm working on a project for school that makes use of a lot of driven keys. I'm making buildings by starting with a cube and then using driven keys to animate extrudes. In the end I want a simple control attribute, with values between 0 and 100. 0 being the simple cube at the beginning, 100 being the fully realized building. The idea is to make an animatable cityscape that is constantly building itself. I got all that working, but now I'm wondering this:

Is there a way to do this on the regular timeline? Can I make a normal timeline from 0-100, animate my building along that and then convert that animation into a driven key animation.

I haven't found any mention of it in the helpfiles or on the internet, but it seems to me this would be a pretty simple thing to do. I just don't know how.

If anybody has any idea how to do it, or where to look for answers it would be much appreciated!

[joojaa]

Connect all drivers to one attribute. How good are you at scripting? Then again with the same effort you can do the driven keys automatically too.

[thnkr]

It's really simple; you need to replace time as an input to the animCurve, something that is not shown but implicit in how the animCurveTL works. set driven keys use an animCurveUL, but that doesn't have to bother you. what you do is connect the controller to the driven object with a connectAttr statement like:

connectAttr -f controller.attribute driven_attribute.input;

Maya will insert a node that converts from units to time, unitToTimeConversion, so that the TU works with units as inputs.