IK Baking: Baking Match Goal Orientation bones

[NTICED]

Howdy all,
I am trying to bake animation on a character rig for fbx export- all is fine and dandy- except, that I cannot find a way to bake rotation of bones that are set to match goal orentation. An example of this would be the ankle and toe of your standard null driven foot rig that has a heel, ball, toe and ankle null, with the ankle bone using orentation of the ankle null and toe bone using goal orientation of the toe null.

I have used Virtual Mocap motion modifier on the bones, mental fish's plugin, etc which will bake the bones just fine that are regular ik driven, but those bones set to follow their goals' orientation do not bake the rotation as one might hope as part of the recording process.

D-Storm's Bake IK to Key *used to* work in >lightwave 9.3, which also would bake the goal oriented bones rotation values, but this plugin no longer works properly in versions >9.5 when the ik system changed (it will bake normal ik bones but now match goal orientation bake does not work and it does not bake bones that follow pole vectors etc)

Please tell me I am missing something simple!!

[NTICED]

...and i fixed my own problem. Chaged the bones that were using match goal orientation of the nulls, over to same as item (world coordinates) within the bone's rotation panel of the motion options contollers and limits tab. Had to use follower on the ankle null object that the ankle bone is following, to follow the pitch of the ball null [- the ankles natural rotation value].

In the end this makes the foot rig work exactly as it did when the items were set to use match goal orientation, however now they are able to be motion baked with motion baker motion modifier as they are using IK all the way. The fbx exported as a thing of beauty.

[RebelHill]

Yup, you can't bake MGO, but you can use different constraints to give the same effect. However in some situations this still doesnt work out correctly and you NEED to use MGO... in this case you can create a duplicate of the item that needs the MGO, and set this to use MGO, then constrain the actual item to this duplicate using same as item in world mode, and the values will get passed through correctly for either referncing, baking, etc.

[NTICED]

I liked it when D-Storm's Bake IK to key magically did everything for you ;-)

[RebelHill]

Yes, true that just being able to straight bake it using Dstorm was indeed nice... However I do love being able to use constraints around MGO too now because, as well as providing for baking, it also allows LW to see the changing values "live" allowing you to reference the MGO delivered actions to drive other things, which is cool.

[NTICED]

Not to mention i would not trade ik stability for 9.3