accurate hip movement in walk
 

I've got joints at the hips, knees, ankles, balls of feet, toe areas. I've got an IK handle at the ankle connecting it to the hip. So it looks nice when I lift the leg and bring it down. Except that the hip does not respond as it does in real life (due to the way IK works). I have to rotate the hips by hand to make the right response. This makes it difficult. I was wondering if anybody had come up with a good way to automate this response by the hips. So when I lift a leg, pull it forward, then bring it down to contact the ground the hips/pelvis make the appropriate shift/rotate.

Thanks.

progress
 

I'm making some progress. I made another ik handle from the ankle to pelvis. So there are 2 ik handles at the ankle. One to the hip for accurate knee bending and another for hip movement. I made a locator at the ball of the foot. I made the locator the parent of these ik handles (as well as 2 others relating to the ball and toe of the foot).

The only problem now is that because of the ik handle, the pelvis rotates and the skeleton leans way over. The upper body needs to accomodate.

EDIT: I found that making additional pelvis joints to make the ik handles fixes those problems, because now these duplicate joints are not parents of the upper body.