More information on drivers

Blender Courses Talk
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#1

Here is the link for the Driver documentation:
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/animation/drivers/index.html

So according to the introduction:
“Drivers are a way to control values of properties by means of a function, or a mathematical expression. Drivers are an extremely powerful tool for building rigs and are typically used to drive bone transforms and the influence of shape keys, action constraints and modifiers, often using custom properties as inputs.”

I looked up this because I have never heard of drivers before and I felt that in the video this was not explained well.

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#2

Drivers are -I think- old Blender core.
They can be useful but on very specific occasions.
The current Blender approach is to rely on NODES, a graphical UI.
instead of drivers in combination with Python.

You can use a driver to analyze an audio file and do some sort of lip sync.
The audio file > driver > shapekeys for the mouth.

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#3

If my understanding is correct the main power of drivers is the you can control anything with them. For example the color ramp node does not have input for controlling positions of colors, but with drivers you can control that.
And actually at the 2023 Blender Conference there was an interesting talk which mentioned the cool side of using drivers:

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#4

Drivers are extremely useful, I’m sure Blender can do it too, but back in the day I would create rigs in 3ds Max that used drivers to allow for hand controls where a single slider would control the whole hand to go from open to a clenched fist. It really helped me pass my character animation course in Uni.

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