it WAS the ik. deleting the two bones fixed it they were so far down it moved the entire model and distorted the whole thing so definitely delete the ik and bake the animation if you're doing it like that

i have no idea what this means.

i changed the setting in the object properties "parent type" under "relations" from "object" to "armature" and it looks like how it does in hlmv now

https://imgur.com/a/J86PHmg

i don't know what i'm breaking. i have another model that's ending up the same way but for goldsrc. it has an ik rig that i ignored but i exported 3 other viewmodels with iks on them that didnt break when exported. the only similarities between the 2 models that broke is that i either added new mesh data or new bones and/or deleted bones. the process was otherwise entirely exactly the same