Zeth Willie returns with a look at using the distance Node in Maya when rigging that makes for a cleaner rig set up in the end. Check out the article for Using the distanceBetween Node for Rigging in Maya on Zeth Willies site here.
Zeth Willie notes on his tutorial: “I got tired of using all the locators and UI stuff from the distance tool and dug around and found this thingy-me-bobby, called the distanceBetween node. It’s setup is a bit like the pointOnCurveInfo node (command line, etc) and there are some tricky bits to get the proper readings, but it’s certainly cleaner in your rig and pretty easy to setup as a mel script (I’ll post the code I use here on my blog since it may be a bit hard to read here).”
As a side note, for fun you can check out the appropriately relevant and nerdy DistanceNode t-shirt at the lesterbanks store!