IK controlled feet and legs become disjointed during blend space

Development Character & Animation
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I have a simple idle/walk/run 1D Blend Space controlled by speed, which works fine for the most part. But the IK setup in the feet doesn’t behave as expected. Between animations, the foot becomes disjointed at the ankles. The bones seem to become unattached as they blend between animations, leading to the foot stretching. You can see in the image how the foot bones slide past each other between animations.

The last picture is what the rig looks like in Blender. I’m worried that the rig is too complicated or otherwise not set up to work with Blend Spaces in Unreal, but I’m hoping to avoid scrapping all of my animations (for the nth time) because of one small problem with the rig.

I’ve been trying to fix this all day to no avail, I would appreciate any ideas on how to fix this.

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Coming at it with a new mindset the next day I realized that the weird toe pivot set-up was likely the culprit and resigned myself to rebuilding the foot and consequently having to redo my animations.

But fortunately I was able to modify it in a way that keep all my animations intact! All I had to do was set the bone parents back to what they should be, and create new, non-deforming bones to do the actual pivoting, then use those to drive the deformation bones.

This was a good lesson for me in the importance of having a simple, solid deformation rig, separate from complicated driver bones.

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