Aside from doing some edits and rigging a few simple things, I've never attempted much in Poser's Setup Room, but I have something I want to see if I can rig in Poser. it's just a test object, not a real figure, but I figure no point wasting time learning with something too complex.

Here's the deal though - the only rigging I've done is in LightWave. LW has several different ways you can rig, but the two simplest ways involve either using weight maps or not using weight maps. A weight map in LW is a vertex map such as a selection set, and is is about the same thing as in Poser where you assign bones to a group. However, in LightWave, you don't need to assign bones to a group (weight map), because every bone will automatically influence the geometry it is closest to.
if you DO create weight maps, you tell your bones to use whichever weight maps apply, and each bone will influence only the geometry the weight map is assigned to.

So it's about the same as in Poser's Setup Room where you tell each bone what group to deal with, but with far more control and options.

No, this isn't a rant about how LightWave's bones work....

In LW Layout if you simply draw your bones over your geometry, the bones influence the geometry they are near. Sometimes that can necessitate the need for weight maps, but there are ways of avoiding using weight maps, if you use certain hold or control bones. Just extra little bones that serve to help anchor geometry surrounding difficult areas. Essentially, such anchor bones prevent deformations that might occur otherwise.

OK, so what I'm wondering is, in planning a figure should I plan on having groups for every little part, or can Poser use an "anchor bone" sort of idea and deal with it if I just allow it to "auto group" them?

I'm also wondering if I'm not trying to defeat Poser's inherent design in rigging though. Is it simply that you MUST have specific bones assigned to specific groups of polygons? I'm just asking this because in my experience in LW it's been far easier to add hold bones or edit existing bones, as opposed to locking them into a certain geometry through a weight map.

And of course how I decide to go about it depends alot on how I set up my OBJ import - whether it has predefined groups or not. Yes, by the way, I do know I can create and edit groups in Poser, but it takes like 30 times as long to do that in Poser as it does in LightWave, so please don't mention that. :-)

Just wondering basically how you riggers out there go about it, and how you plan for Poser. I've looked at the DAZ way, but that gets kind of dull and there's only so much you can learn from them since they use the same OBJ for every figure they've ever made, probably even including the dragon. ;-)