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. ;-)

 It all depends on what you are rigging in my opionion.  We do almost all mechanical so we go the root of grouping and material assigning in UVmapper.  Then we convert a phi file and bring it into Poser and use the joint tool to assign rotation, up and down etc.  Thats what we do.  Sharen

Thanks Sharen.
I don't know that I want to mess with PHI files and all that. Isn't that basically a text file of the hierarchy? I prefer to do things visually, although with smaller objects Poser makes that very difficult to get in there with the camera to adjust bones.
Well I'm talking about organic models anyway. The deformations in an organic model need alot more precision than in a hard surface mechanical model.

 Phibuilder is a LOT easier than messing with the Setup Room in my opinion. Then again, I'd rather be cooked in oil than having to deal with the Setup Room in the first place, so I'm not completely rational there ;)

That said.. if you're rigging a human, yes all the body parts should have the names that Poser expects, and roughtly the number it expectx, too. The benefit of this is that generic poses will work acceptably and that things like the Walk Designer will function.

Poser is very peculiar with naming. LeftForearm MUST be internally referred to as lForearm - casing like that.

When it comes to deformations - what to deform and what NOT to deform, that's where Joint parameters and in some occasions, spherical falloff zones come into play. That's how you tell Poser which polygons to squish when you're for instance bending a leg. Abnd also which polygons NOT to squish :) DrGeep has a good tutorial on Joint Parameters. They're easy to learn, and HARD to master. At least that's my opinion.

OK, so the falloff zones just limit or expand the influence a bone has on its grouped geometry, but only that group, right? Or can the falloff extend outward to geometry "owned" by another bone?

I'm not concerned about generic poses or the walk designer, but you say you HAVE to use the same general body part naming convention? That doesn't seem to make sense. Why can't I name it Forearm_L, for example, instead of lForearm?

The joint parameters and falloff zones will typically encompass several groups. Not a lot, but some. Take a look at one of the included Poser figures for how it's done :) (Just open the Joint Editor and the joint parameters will become visible) 

This is an example of an organic figure 100% rigged with PhiBuilder :) No Setup Room was harmed in the creation of this little guy ;)

Cute little figure, TG. :-)

I guess I made it sound like I thought using the PHI file way was somehow in opposition to organic figure rigging. No - I know that's not the case, I just meant that I'd prefer to do it visually as much as possible.

The naming convention of lShin or rShin must be used in order for Poser to recognise the left and right body parts and symetry.   But you can name the left and right shin something else such as lRock and rRock if you wanted but as has been mentioned, if the regular body part names are not used then many things like poses and walk cycle, bvh files that you have for other figures will not work with your figure.  On center body parts there is no left or right so you have chest, head, etc.

Edit: also the bending deformation ONLY occurs between the child and parent. IE shin will only  deform itself and thigh poly's which is a big pain in the butt, and one of the reasons I have gone on insane quests to try to get around the horrid rules of Poser rigging.

Edit 2: A really great book that explains rigging and many other things related to poser is "Secrets of figure creation" by BL Render.

Thanks man, I do appreciate it.

OK, well I messed around with some rigging in Poser. I had some reasonable success, but I decided I just don't like it. I just had to give it a shot though, you know? Well, I'm not giving up either, but I'm not happy that a "pro" version of a program is still full of the same crap the non-pro version has.
Speaking of which, what was it again that made Smith-Micro Poser Pro "pro"? I can't even remember right now, but it seems to me I keep running into these things that I would think should have been at least a little bit improved upon.

One thing I think would make a huge difference in rigging/posing is if Poser supported subdivision geometry. Well obviously that would make a huge difference for displacements too, but it's going to take alot to make Poser support anything like that, and probably would need a whole new OpenGL rewrite as well.

Oh well, I'm not going to be giving anybody any Poser figure creating competition anytime soon, that's for sure. ;-)

There is an auto-grouping function in the group editor that will assign ungrouped polygons to the nearest bone, but imo it is horribly messy and much better to assign your groups manually in the modeler - don't even waste more than a few minutes with Poser's group editor trying to do this.  No loop or fill selection, you literally have to draw boxes around each and every polygon.  If your OBJ import/export doesn't support polygon groups in a way that Poser understands, then you have my sympathies.

There is also the wonderful "bone flipping" bug that can happen even with the simplest rigging projects like a straight line of bones in a single chain.  Smith Micro tells me this is "to be fixed", whatever that means.

One of the most useful and valuable adjuncts is some function-heavy CR2 editor, I use Dimension3D's CR2 editor for sale here at Renderosity.

Yeah well as I mentioned in my first post I use LightWave (9.6 64 bit) for modeling and OBJ hacking. believe me when I tell you it's abilities to group polygons and vertex selection sets is about as easy and fast as can possibly be. Select loops, hotkeys for expanding or shrinking selections, select edges, points or polys, reverse selections and all that.
I wouldn't spend two minutes in Poser if I needed to regroup anything more than a six sided cube. ;-)

Edit:
Oh yeah, by the way, LW's OBJ export is read perfectly by Poser, so that's not an issue. It's also great for making morph targets because it can export only vertices if you want, making the files smaller, and you don't need facets for MT's.

I'll chime in with Sharen and TG: the PHI file is simplest.  The Setup Room
is like Nurse Ratched: she knows where everything should go, and she will
put everything in the "right place" no matter what you intend.  The result is
either magic or horrible, and the process is slippery.

With the PHI file you're in complete control.   As long as you plan the
hierarchy right, you'll get the figure you want every time.