A Question on Rigging Coats

obscure_official

I am remaking a staple character of my creation that wears a long coat. I have a question regarding how one rigs such a long coat. What I normally do is to make the lower coat a separate part and simply combine them via rigging. I also saw alternatives where the flowing coat is part of the body but it has multiple bones within it so it can be manually moved. Any suggestions on how to deal with this? Here is a picture of the aforementioned character, notice the lower coat is a separate mesh that is merely connected via weight paints, should it be part of the main mesh and be controlled by its own bones? Any good examples in regards to rigging such attire? I use ZBrush to make clothes, usually the character's clothing is their body in some of my characters.

Quasar

You'll have to experiment to find out
Personally, I would have bone chains run down the coat. The tricky part will be vertex weighting so the body does not clip through the coat at the extreme leg positions.