Animateting appliances - 3ds max

[Peter C]

Hi y'all. I recently have an idea for a personal project That I want to do that involves Appliances and their night of partying. Kinda like the darker side of "The Brave Little Toaster." Well, The appliances are going to stretch and squash but I don't want to use the Modifiers in 3ds max because the lids are separate objects and the Gizmos for them will cause all sorts of errors and such. I don't want to get into it. Plus I'm limited in the amount of movement.

So The next thing I can think of is the FFD gizmo. But how would I set up the rig so I can control the FFD gizomo through a series of Controls that are positioned on the external rig?

Basically here is what I'm asking. How would you rig a box for animation?

[Awakener]

How about using stretched bones? Animation -> bone tools. Go to the object properties and make sure Freeze length is not checked.

Now you can create bones (no need to apply IK) that can be stretched, rotated and scaled in any way and direction, plus you can make all your bones to editable poly’s, giving them different shapes, even vertex animating them. Also you can use reaction manager for extra control