Why's it bad to use a lot of connections?

[kronique]

Because you can use too many ? Or is  because they break in some cases? I've never had a constraint break, if i have to use many I direct them to groups. I tend to parent Ik's under controllers too when i can. 

But anyway lemme know why? 

[joojaa]

It is not bad to have many connections. Number of connections is a neutral thing, it is neiter good nor bad. Many connections may be indicating that you have a lot of redundant nodes, but that in it self is not bad and depends entirely on wether you use redundancy to advantage or not.

This kind of thing happens when you over simplify things. Its like saying since programmers produce code, lets evaluate their performance based on lines of code written. Well just to make it clear best coders reduce the length of code, or keep it as long. Same here its not about how many connections but that its as lean as possible for the job at hand. Since less stuff means easier, it means easier to understan, but not allways.

[pixl-visn]

Just to add to what Joojaa said.

Maya of course has to calculate all the connections you make, so having an excessive amount of connections will slow down your performance. But you should't worry about this at the expense of making your charater, or whatever you are building, work the way it needs to. You should connect as many nodes as you need to for whatever you are building, and not worry about a specific amount as being too many.

In a lot of cases it is good use constraints instead of parenting as it gives you an extra level of control and allows you to separate and group nodes in the scene hierarchy. A simple example would be, constraining instead of parenting rigid objects to a skeleton. That way you can keep all the character geo grouped together, separate from the rig.

Parenting IK's under controllers is good, keep doign that. All that stuff should be hidden from the animator. don't let them touch the joints or IK's or anything else directly. just give them control curves that control everything with direct connections, expressions, or set driven keys etc. Another benefit is that if you turn the selection mask to just curves you can select all the animation controllers easily.

[pilou--2]

I'd love to know why you think it's better to parent Ik's under controllers.

Personnally I'd rather constraint them and put them all into a group so I can Easily parent constraint or scale constraint them without messing with any kind of hierarchy. (easier to sort, work with, and debug)

[pixl-visn]

Yeah I should have constrain instead of Parent. In the last paragraph of my post i slipped up and used Parent in a more generic way as in making the control curve affect the IK somehow. I guess it was because I understood his post to be about parenting the IK vs keying on the IK directly, and i was responding to that.

I like keep the hierarchies separated with groups and as well, makes life a lot earlier like you said.

[pritish-dogra]

Personnally I'd rather constraint them and put them all into a group so I can Easily parent constraint or scale constraint them without messing with any kind of hierarchy. (easier to sort, work with, and debug)

While there is nothing wrong with what you do, I would like to point out that when you use parent constraint you are simply adding more matrix calculation to the rig. If it is a simple character, this would ok, but if you have have complex character then this could be slow issue, especially if you have other nifty feature in the rig

Parent constraint are awesome, but use a lot of them, the rig would start lagging.

Direct connection and parenting are much faster to evaluate.

[joojaa]

Well its not so much about matrix calcs after all a parentted model IS connected to its parent ableit maya hides the connection (but still its connected to the matrix slots with invisble implied connections just like time1 connects to all slots named time even if you donte specify it). Rather the slowdown comes form the fact that it causes maya to unoptimally evaluate the DAG, and do a few extra matrix operations.

So no i would not constraint my bones separate form my controllers, however i would seperate the bound geo because then you can still change all thet matters. But yeah the approach is valid.