Some of you might remember that I did a T-rex project earlier this year. I modeled the REX using Kurt's tutorial then rigged it, painted it and animated it. The animation was pretty bad but what really bothered me is that I could never come up with a good foot rig so that the toes could curl under as the beast lifted it's foot to take the next step. The leg used an IK solver and the foot used a standard type "reverse foot" rig. This kind of a set up works well if you're doing a character with shoes on or something like that but I wanted the toes to curl under like the CGI Godzilla in the movie. With a reverse foot rig it's easy to make the foot rotate from the ball but when the foot comes off the ground, there was no way that I could discover to rotate the toes in, almost like it was making a fist with its toes.

My T-rex animation

So, are there any riggers out there who could throw a clue my way?

I did build one rig that allowed the foot to do everything I just described but the problem was that it was controlled with MEL scripts. I need to find a way that is able to be key framed. The MEL scripts worked just fine for reversing the Heirarchy of the joints in the reverse foot rig so that I could have the toes bend in either direction (rotate + or _ around the X axis)but you could not rewind and play back the animation since there were no keyframes. The foot would twist and do all sorts of weird things.

Any thoughts?