rigging: ankle vs. foot

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

What is the purpose of the foot bone, given that legacy animations drive the whole foot by the ankle bone?

It's especially confusing that the sample Bento skeleton uses the foot bone to drive the toes, and furthermore places the toe bone past the end of the foot and weights no vertices to it to it.

Is there any consistency to how existing animations and common mesh bodies use these bones?

[Mollymews]

5 minutes ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

What is the purpose of the foot bone ...

Is there any consistency to how existing animations and common mesh bodies use these bones?

for human avatars then is rare to find any foot bone animation

avatars that do use this typically are like animals, anthro and mysticals where they have rear legs

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

18 hours ago, Mollymews said:

for human avatars then is rare to find any foot bone animation

What do animators do when they create toe-wiggling animations? Do they rotate the foot bone? The toe? Both? Are such animations so scarce there is no convention?

[Mollymews]

1 hour ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

What do animators do when they create toe-wiggling animations? Do they rotate the foot bone? The toe? Both? Are such animations so scarce there is no convention?

conventions typically come about thru abundant use cases.  For human forms in SL then the most abundant case of bending the toes, is when wearing high heels. Is so abundant that mesh body makers make different mesh feet shapes  to cater for this, rather than animate the bones

because of this, making mesh feet in different forms, then the number of use cases requiring animation is reduced to specific situations. Specific situations like for example foot/toe position when rock-climbing or motogp peg placement,  or some forms of dance, etc.  Toe positions which are are nice to haves for close-up viewing/photo/cinema

 

edit add: Just mention that the convention of different mesh feet forms came about because when rigged mesh first came to SL there was no toe bone. The advanced skeleton we have now came later.  And people/customers got used to being able to change their toe shape by changing their feet to fit their shoes, shoes made for the specific foot shape. And this convention of changing our feet to fit our shoes has continued

Edited September 19, 2020 by Mollymews

[OptimoMaximo]

On 9/19/2020 at 4:34 AM, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

It's especially confusing that the sample Bento skeleton uses the foot bone to drive the toes, and furthermore places the toe bone past the end of the foot and weights no vertices to it to it.

This is once more a point of view issue. You see that as a bone, while the original skeleton was made in Maya which has no bone system, rather a joint system. So if you look at the bone head position, their placement drive their naming. It's interesting to note that the legacy avatar shapes on the feet worked the heel shape foot deformation using an offset between ankle and foot joint, for which the heel tip uses the vertical location of the foot joint while the ankle gets raised, creating the heel deformation on the base mesh avatar.