Rigging: Armor and the like
 

A little about my problem:

I have been modeling for a good amount of time now. I can farely easily model what I want quickly. However, there comes a time when I wish to turn one of my many puppets into a nice/mean living and breathing creation. While I can sweat out keyframes with the best of them, I cannot, to save my life, create a rig that moves anything but a single skinned mesh.

I now have such a problem again. I have a Character, full with skeleton systems and the like. However, this particular character has still armor, something that is not supposed to bend or deform as much as skin and arms. How would I go about rigging these pieces that do not deform, but still move with the character?

I had this with the transformer for the previous and current challenge. As long as it is parented to the rest of the body parts then you can paint the weights of the object and it will all move and not stretch.
Give it a go and you'll see it is actually straightforward to get bits to move without deforming.

Si

So I will just paint the character like normal, and leave the objects alone, but parented to the character? Or Paint the character and armor alike?

doing armor sounds like what should be done for a robot.... in doing a robot setup, I'd just put the pieces of armor into the joint-chain heirarchy, or parent constraint them to the joints. The movement would be exactly the same, and it wouldn't ever deform.

Another way is to use rigid binding for the armor plate, though I do concur with Xander-o's suggestions as well. Using the edit membership tool, you basically assign vertices to certain joints, and the armor part will bend with only that joint (if you set it up that way)!

For the record, a mesh need not be single-skinned!

Whatever the case may be, all the best and don't forget to post the results! :-)