[maya] opinion about using containers

I wanted to get a sense of what people think about Maya’s containers. I have been at studios where containers caused nothing but grief. But some people love the concept. For myself, I’m not that familiar with all the ins and outs of containers. Would love to hear if people think they are worth it and if they’ve been improved in the latest version.

containers are awesome now that the node editor has a way to display the contents propperly, its a nice way of grouping and connecting of several rigpieces like fingers to a hand, a hand to an arm, arm to body etc
it just makes it a little bit nicer and gives better overhead then just grouping stuff together in a transform node
but i guess that all depends on the use of the containers in the pipeline.

I use them to organize my rig and so far so good. A few things I love.

  • You can add non-dag nodes.
  • Blackbox and published controls keep things tidy and safe for animators.
  • An entire portion of a rig can be cleanly removed.