i was trying to do some shoulder armor for M4 . but armor that doesnt bend. you know like a real armor not the conforming clothing.

it should folow the body but at the same time you should have the chance to tweak the pose because armor must folow the arm.

this is classic conforming . as you see it bends. look what happened on the left shoulder. it deformed it .  looks unrealistic.

here i changed the name of the group in the OBJ. in the CR2 i copyed the shoulder group and renamed it. now i have a bone that folows the collar but at the same time i have full control how to move it. i can twist it ,move it up-down and front-back.

i was reading on some forum that this is how they riged  the armor for some game cinematics and cgi movies.

lShdr and rShdr are used for posing.

you can download and test it here
www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/details.php

When rigging a darth vader figure, I made parts that were not to bend with different group names from the usual ones but still part of the figure.

i noticed now some mistakes. when i move the hip or the chest on M4 then the armor moves very strange. what could the problem be?

You're never going to get a realistic hard armor rig that will follow the character in certain areas, not without an impractical amount of work.  Avoid putting any straight, hard-looking structure in places where bending is going on, like at the hip or endpoints of chest or abdomen.  You can fix some of it with JCM but the more complex the model, the harder that is.  It does help to look at how real armor is designed though (that strap right under the armpit is just not how a pauldron is constructed).

You have a lot of leeway with science fiction/fantasy armor, because you don't have to follow traditional designs, but certain things are just not very ergonomic at all.

i am now happy with what i did. i like that i can pose the armor to the body.

but now the problem is that when i move the hip and chest on M4 the armor moves very strange. can i fix this? 

Probably not in a way that's practical but let's see a pic of the problem.

Oh that's something entirely different form what I thought you meant.  How did you rig this in the first place?

i think the problem was that i deleted all the  addChilds that i didnt need  from the  CR2. i now wrotte it again and i didnt delete them and it looks like it could work

Quote - Oh that's something entirely different form what I thought you meant.  How did you rig this in the first place?

i copyed the shoulder group in the CR2 then i renamed it to Shdr. in Blender i made the Shdr groups.

so now it folows the M4 body. but at the same time i can tweak the position so that it works in the context of the body pose.

but its not good enough. i uploaded it so that you all can test it and give me feedback.

Quote - i copyed the shoulder group in the CR2 then i renamed it to Shdr. in Blender i made the Shdr groups.

so now it folows the M4 body. but at the same time i can tweak the position so that it works in the context of the body pose.

It may be just because you're missing some bones between hip and collars but imo you're wasting your time trying to a conformer by cutting and pasting like that.  You want to look into getting a "blank" CR2 for M4 (or whatever figure) to apply to any conformer, and then do minimal adjustments on that, rather than trying to build one from cutting parts out of M4 and pasting them into something else with a CR2 editor.  While it's often necessary to edit the CR2 for various things, setting up the rig is not one of them - far too many things can be screwed up that way.

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=96995&flatnum=1

i updated now the armor. try it.

i think it works now.

While there are a lot of people who will want to sell you this information, here's how to rig a conformer (spent several minutes trying to find it, screw it it'll be quicker just to type it):

1 - Import your OBJ into an empty scene in Poser
2 - Go to the Setup room
3 - In the Figures library, navigate to your blank M4 rig and load it
4 - Group Editor -> Auto Group (ONLY in this case, because your model is very straightforward; otherwise you'd want to group it by hand)
5 - Go back to the Pose room and save the new figure to library
 
Done, you have rigged, congratulations.  There is more to it than this of course, e.g. adjusting joint parameters, but this is how you get a good starting point.  Points to improve would be things like removing unnecessary bones - although technically that is not required, it does make the conformer nicer to work with if you don't have dozens of junk bones that don't do anything - and adjusting joint parameters, something you'll probably have to do for this particular model to get the pauldrons to follow the shoulders and not get mashed.  See Phil Cooke's great video tutorials on all that.

i would love adjusting joints. to bad that in poser pro 2010 they dont work like they should

SM did something wrong.

As I mentioned in our pm's together, conforming is going to bend the armor and would be the last choice.
Smart parent the prop and use dependant parameters to fix your pose problems.

You can cheat with conforming but it really won't work as conforming ultimately deforms the mesh...not what you want with armor.
I was able to create a complete Halo outfit all by smart parenting and everything stayed where it was supposed to. I cheated on the chest protector and used conforming but limited the deforming by playing with the joint parameters, but it still bent the armor at the joints...that's why conforming is not a good choice.

 Thinking out loud here.. what if you set Bend = 0 inside the CR2? Wouldn't it be a stiff conformer then? Or wouldn't that work? Haven't tried it... just guessing :)

Rigging a model won't deform the mesh if you don't want it to, if you're willing to take steps to prevent it (e.g. turning off bend as TG just said).  Making a bunch of separate pieces set up to be children of bones doesn't offer any advantage, it just makes the item a pain to work with for the user.

Turning off bend does have the problem of causing the mesh to break where polygons are adjacent and connected to neighboring groups, and you need to be cautious of children bones causing deformation in their parent, but this isn't a big deal.

Quote -  Thinking out loud here.. what if you set Bend = 0 inside the CR2? Wouldn't it be a stiff conformer then? Or wouldn't that work? Haven't tried it... just guessing :)

That was what I did with the figure I mentioned, but parts that have cloth or other bending parts wont move as they should.

Dodger did a tutorial at his whatever3d site about a method for keeping solid parts of a figure solid, it involves using a smaller version of the armour part but you would be better to find the original tutorial to see all the steps needed.

Quote - As I mentioned in our pm's together, conforming is going to bend the armor and would be the last choice.
Smart parent the prop and use dependant parameters to fix your pose problems.

You can cheat with conforming but it really won't work as conforming ultimately deforms the mesh...not what you want with armor.
I was able to create a complete Halo outfit all by smart parenting and everything stayed where it was supposed to. I cheated on the chest protector and used conforming but limited the deforming by playing with the joint parameters, but it still bent the armor at the joints...that's why conforming is not a good choice.

try to download it. it doesnt bend.

I made the suit grey so the other parts can be seen easier, I still have to fix the pokethrough in the boots and I don`t know why the animation jumps the way it does, it should be smooth.

the armor needs to be able to look good with some extreme heroic poses.

There is just no easy way to have "hard parts" automatically avoid collision with the figure, the user is going to have to move them around in some poses to get certain bits into a convincing position.

i agree that the user will have to move the parts around. we have to find the best way.

Just leave the translate dials exposed, whether you rig it or treat it as a set of smartprops.  If you are using a blank/donor rig, you may have to unhide these channels (not a big trick, change "hidden" values for those channels from 1 to 0).

Attached Link: http://poserpros.daz3d.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=45196

Dodger did explain how to do that at his site, I found the thread, you probably need to be a member there to read it.

http://www.whatever3d.com/forum/read.w3d?thread=225

Even that example has the problem of the hard parts intersecting other parts in certain poses, although granted it looks great in a wide variety of poses.
edit: in case that sounds like "faint praise", all Poser human figures themselves can be posed in ways where the mesh intersects itself, even with limits on.  Some common sense has to be expected from the user (even if it's not all that common).

So what method did you end up using?

i duplicated the shoulder bone. i moved it up a little.

now the collar folows the body when i pose M4. then at the end i pose the seperate shoulders. as for now it works like i wanted it to work.

i will upload it.

That came out pretty well :) 

of course now its made only for the body. if you add a shirt or some other clothes then it touches

i didnt use poser 2012 for any hardsurface body armor.

are there any new tools or options for rigging armour?

This doesn't involve any new technology, and there are probably all sorts of reasons why this is dumb, but what about a suit of smart props? Certainly it would be inconvenient if you had to load them all everytime, but you could load them once, fix them to an invisible conforming .cr2 skeleton, and then save that to your characters folder.  Then you'd just load that smart prop laden .cr2 and conform it to your figure?