I'd like to do a fully body armor battle suit for a human figure. Most of it would be armor plated, but some sections would just conform to the figure itself. My initial plan was to export a human figure and build the suit around it in rhino. Then export the suit and turn it into a prop and put it back on the figure so it could be posed. I wonder though, would it just be best to import the suit as a new figure, bone it and pose it? Thoughts, opinions... Thanks!

It would depend on how the joints where going to work. If the armor was going to be light and form-fitting like the StarWars white stormtroopers, I'd use a catsuit (black) and build the armor as props then parent them to the appropriate body parts on the catsuit. You could then conform the catsuit. If the armor was going to be heavy and the joints where going to part of the armor, I'd probably use a figure just for scaling while building the mesh and convert the mesh to a figure. Assuming that you'd only be seeing the head of the Poser figure, I wouldn't even try getting the armor to work with the figure. I'd just use the head of the Poser figure and use a neck collar to hide from the neck down.

Actually either method is valid. In most cases having the suit overlay a Poser figure can be considered a waste since the figure "under" the armor isn't seen... Unless you want to make the props so sections can be left off, as in a figure "suiting up", or undressing. On the other hand there is the construction "overhead" of making the armor into a viable stand alone figure, a task that can be harder than it first looks. From the point of view of using such a suit of armor the first method (either confroming or parented props) is appealing since it gives the most versatility. Which is why you see so many more conforming clothing than figures like the P4 and P5 casual figures, which are pre-dressed stand alone figures. mike

Perhaps the biggest problem with using an underlying figure is that you have a lot of geometry overhead that you don't need. I'm not sure just how much RAM an invisible figure uses, but the Daz unimesh is some 70,000 polygons. If you want to do the work, a standalone figure is best, I think. And there's no reason why a catsuit can't be used without any figure inside. The body parts have to have the same names for a clothing item to conform, so a pose file will work the same.

So it looks like the answer is there is no easy answer. How much harder is it to create a figure and rig it? I've heard that can be quite difficult.

I do conforming figures once in a while, it's not that difficult. You must be sure that the group name for each part you make is the exact same name as the poser figures body part name (the poser figure you are modeling around). You must build the part in rhino in the exact correct location, so you should convert the figures obj file from the runtime/geometry folder, not export it from poser then convert it. After you have all your armor pieces named correctly, you can use Kattman's utility to turn it into a confroming figure by using the source cr2 file of the figure you modelled it around and applying it to your obj file, that's it, very easy.