I have a question: I know we've discussed the rigging of the toes earlier, but now that I'm actually getting to it, maybe it's time to reconsider the options. There are basically two ways to proceed:

1) Group several toes into one actor and pose them all as one. That's how the current rigging works, with the actor hierarchy Instep -> Toe -> BigToe1 -> BigToe2. The main advantage of that hierarchy is that no actor has more than one child, which makes it easy to keep the toecap from slipping into the flesh (ouch!). A big disadvantage is that curling or spreading the toes requires heavy JCM action. It would be possibly to have a second 'collective' toe actor, which would change the hierarchy into something like this:

Instep
Toe1
    Toe2
    BigToe1
        BigToe2

That would make curling the toes easier while still leaving the total number of actors relatively low. Dealing with the toecap would be a bit trickier, but still manageable. Small adjustment in the relative positions of the four grouped toes could be implemented as morphs.

2. Create two actors for every toe, similarly to the way the hand is rigged. The hierarchy would look like this:

Instep
    BigToe1
        BigToe2
    IndexToe1
        IndexToe2
    MidToe1
        MidToe2
    RingToe1
        RingToe2
    PinkyToe1
        PinkyToe2

This would making spreading and curling much easier, and give a lot of flexibility for other poses. On the other hand it seems a bit like overkill, since the individual toes can hardly move that independently. But as with the hands, one could introduce dials for common poses like curl, spread, bend up etc, and as long as there are no single toes sticking out, it should still be possible to avoid excessive toecap poke-through.

So, what do people think is the preferable configuration? What are your experiences with existing figures that use the individual toe rigging? Is it worth trying? I'll probably experiment a bit with both options, but some opinions are always good.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.