effacer, are you saying you'd like all the pieces so you can try rigging it when i'm done with them?

haha murambi, no pressure right? :p

i'm making everything up as i go, but yeah, i'll go into some detail about how i'm doing things if you want, i'm kind of going backwards to the whole model -> texture -> rig workflow and going model+rig - > model -> rig
... if that makes sense... i'm just rigging as i go along

to start with, here's what i'm calling a proof of concept (never actually heard that term until last year now it's being said everywhere...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzWobN6vXoY
this was proof taht i could manage expressions, parent constraints, and set driven keys

i'm still in the pre production phase, but i don't expect it to last too too long

...so... because i've never actually used expressions and i didn't know how to use them on parent constraints it took a while to figure out... ok it didn't take THAT long, but still took a little longer than wanted

so to catch you up with what i've done murambi (and anyone else interested, and i suppose for my own documentation in case i ever have to repeat this)

the model

first i started with a sphere, i probably duplicated it four times and deleted 3 quarters of them.
combined them, then selected their border edges to use bridge, and then fill hole (since what i ended up with was a round square frame)
took the giant bottom face and extruded downwards making the base of the clock

so now that i had the base mesh for the clock done i wanted to cut it up.
i figured it's better to make sure all the pieces are going to fit together before i start detailing anything

i tried to transform it in various ways, i had a way of doing it in my mind, and since i can't exactly cut up my alarmclock and put it back together and cut it up again to see a different transformation i thought i'd just go straight into maya (and also because playing with an imaginary clock wasn't as useful as seeing what is actually happening)

it changed from the original design a fair bit but meh... not worried so much i guess

the rig
made a skeleton for it and since it's hard surface i dont need to worry about soft skinning, i can just parent everything to the bones and detail the bits later on

now... there was a slight problem... if i attached IK to the skeleton i didn't think i could fit all the pieces into the shell because of all the restrictions IK gives
so i couldn't just parent geometry to the bones.. had to use parent constraints

i then used parent constraints to constrain geometry to geometry
so now each piece of geometry will have two parent constraints (at this moment i kept making lots of mistakes like parenting the wrong things and having to delete the constraints, which i ended up doing in the hypergraph, because edit > delete by type > constraints would kill all the constraints including the ones i wanted still)
part of the transformation is changing the weights of the constraints from 0 to 1 (you can go outside these boundaries but i dont know why you would want to and i needed to know the limits for later)

first i decided to just set a keyframe on them to try the transform, but you can already guess what the drawbacks of doing it that way would be.

so i could either use set driven keys to change the constraints around or i could try expressions

decided to go with expressions because i thought it would give some flexibilty later on if needed... probably also because i can't remember how to edit set driven keys...

what i did was i made a custom attribute on each geometry piece that would link the two constraints together so that they were always 'opposite' of each other (in other words they would always add up to 1... i dont know what you would call such relationship...)
so i opened the expression editor and i had no idea how to set the expression on the constraint itself... i did spend a few minutes thinking of other solutions when i didn't know how and some time seeing if the answer was on the internet, but then i figured the script editor would tell me how to write the expression

and it did

so i used the script editor to tell me what i needed to change or link up and all went fine (do you want me to go deeper on how i did this?)

then i made a curve, added an attribute and used set driven keys to make the animation you see in that youtube link

anyway, now that i've figured out how to do it i'll just make a rough transformation so i can model the pieces based on the animation