Well some of you might have attempted the foot rig that I posted a while back. Which I must admit it was somewhat too complicated. Recently some have pointed out to me that the same affect can be achieved with "limit rotation" constraint. I wrote the previous tutorial before "limit rotation" constraint existed, and the only way to limit that rotation was to first make the bone part of an IK chain. Now that is no longer required... thus we can do away with the extra bones which did nothing but serve that purpose.

Important note:
- When you create an armature (the first bone) it should always be created from the TOP view (XY or numpad 7.) Otherwise the Armature object would be rotated by default. If you already created your armature you can easily fix the mistake by applying the rotation (ctrl+A) in object mode... sometime this requires recaluculating bone roll in edit mode, by selecting all bones and [ctrl+N]ing them.

So once again lets take a look at a simple setup:


So when we rotate the Foot.L Bone it causes the IKLeg.L bone to move the whole chain:


So now lets add another bone. So the tip of the bone is at the root of the Toe.L bone and and root of the bone is at the heel of our character.
The easiest way to do this is to create the bone in any random place, then snap the tip to the root location of Toe.L (select the root of Toe.L, Shift+S - cursor to selection, select the tip of the new bone, Shift+S, selection to cursor) Go ahead and snap the root to the same location, but pull it back (G-key, followed by Y-key to limit along Y axis.)


So now parent the Foot.L and Toe.L bones to the Backtoe.L bone.

So this is what we get:


BUT, we want to incorperate that action into one bone.


So when the newly created bone is rotated up, we want the one bone to rotate, but when rotated down, we want the other bone to rotate.

First off the rotation can be acheived with a "CopyRotation" constraint. But using the "Limit Rotation" constraint, we can tell the bones WHEN to NOT copy the bone. Thus achieve the effect!



TADA!!!


Create a Root bone for that leg, and parent the two bones shown below to it:

(Edit: Go ahead and parent the IKKnee.L bone to it)

Give it a try: 01.blend

BUT, there is a problem. The foot distaches from the the leg!

- Snap your cursor at at the tip of the Shin.L bone.
- Create a bone, called ShinAttach.L

- Parent and connect the ShinAttach.L to the Shin.L

This bone will follow the Shin.L bone whereever it goes, we will later attach things to it.
- Root starting at the same place create another bone. Call it DeformAttach.L

To this bone the duplicates of the foot and toe bones will be parented to later.

- Parent this bone to the IKLeg.L bone.
- Go into Pose Mode, Select DeformAttach.L bone and add a Copy Location Constraint to copy the location of the ShinAttach.L bone.

Now for the fun part:

- Select the Toe.L and Foot.L bones.
- Duplicate them.
- Grab them and move down a bit. (Hold Ctrl while moving, we want to snap them back in place later.)
- Select the original toe and shin bones, and click "H" for hide. Or you can put them in a different layer.
- Rename the duplicate bones:
Toe.L.001 to DeformToe.L
Foot.L.001 to DeformFoot.L
- Snap Bone back into place. (Again hold Ctrl while moving.)
- Parent both of the bones to DeformAttach.L

Go into Pose Mode
- Add a Copy Rotation constraint to DeformToe.L to copy the rotation of Toe.L

ALMOST DONE!
- Click on your Mesh and rename your Vertex Groups to use these Duplicate/Deform bones!
- Now either hide, or move into a different layer the bones we are not going to be using.

Choose which layer to place the bone in.

Choose which layers to display!
Hold Shift key to display more then one.


NOW, give it a try: 02.blend

Extra tip:
You don't have to go through all that trouble to do the other side. In object mode, duplicate the armature. In edit mode (using duplicate armature object) snap your cursor to the LowerBody bone. Afterwards delete the Lowerbody bone, select all the other bones, hit W and select "Flip Left-Right Names. Next mirror over the x-axis (Ctrl+M) , while in cursor pivot mode.



In object mode, select the two armatures and join them (Ctrl+J) into one. Don't forget to parent the Hip.R bone to the LowerBody bone. And you are DONE!!!


Try it out: 03.blend