hi,
i'm having trouble trying to rig a woman character with long hair at about chest length.
how do i rig long hair so that it'll not intersect ( pass through ) with the shoulders when the head is twisting or bending ?
any advise would be appreciated.

You've got two options:

1. Make chest, neck and head groups, possibly rCollar and lCollar too, in the hair, and use the womans CR2 as the "donor" for your hair character. If the character you're developing for has a "development version" (Victoria 4 for example), use that as the skeleton donor.

2. create body parts originating from the head and control their movement with ERC slaved to neck, collar and head rotations. Harder to do it right, but it'll allow the user more freedom to pose the hair.
   If the hair has braids or tails that should be able to move freely, they should get their own bones.

I'd recommend option 1; it's easier.
You'll have to add movement morphs to the hair to make it more versatile and useful.

And frankly,I personally prefer strand-based hair. Setup takes more time, but Poser will handle intersections for you. Well-made strand-based hair knocks the  socks off even the best transmapped hair IMO.

Quote - Well-made strand-based hair knocks the  socks off even the best transmapped hair IMO.

Any examples you can point to? I like the idea of strand based hair but have never really been able to get really great results with Poser's Hair Room. I'd love to see it done right and well, it might inspire me to try my hand at it again.

The latest ffive imates in my gallery are all rendered in Poser, all with strand based hair.
I can recommend the free hair by AdoranaDE: good quality, versatile styles, but be careful what to calculate as dynamic and what not. If a hair group doesn't have the collisions check box set, it isn't meant to be calculated!
One problem of dynamic hair is that the dynamics calculations can take like forever. Kirwyn found a neat solution: proxies. Look in freestuff for the username kirwyn, download the free dynamic hair proxy for Jessi or V4, and give it a shot.

hi svdl,
thanks for your advise.
never thought of using groups for  hair method. i'm going to try it.
it'd be great if there is a tutorial on method 2 using strand hair.