Make other controllers 'available' in pose mode?

Question

I'm rigging a character in Blender 2.91.2, and it's my first time doing this in Blender (I have some prior experience with rigging in 3ds Max). I pretty much rigged the whole character and it's working fine.

But for the facial animation I created shape keys, and then I created controllers that affect the shape keys via drivers. These controllers are meshes, not bones. They are working pretty well, but then I realized something a little annoying: to animate the body I have to go into pose mode, but in pose mode I can't animate the facial controllers (cause they are not actually part of the armature). I can animate the facial controllers in object mode, but not the armature. It's annoying, specially since things like the jaw and brows are actually part of the armature, but other mouth controllers are not. To animate that you would have to keep going back and forth between pose mode and object mode, so that's not ideal.

I realize now I should have created the facial controllers with bones inside the armature, but I didn't realize this before. Is there some way I can make the controllers also 'available' for animating in pose mode without having to recreate all the facial controllers with bones in the armature?

Answer 1

The easiest option here is to disable "Lock object modes", on the main Edit menu. If you do this, you'll still be able to select (and manipulate) objects while in Pose mode.

If there's a reason you don't want to do that, an alternative is to parent (bone parent) your mesh controllers to new bones. If you really want, you could even give these bones custom shapes, referencing your mesh controllers, and then hide the mesh controllers on some distant collection....