Inter-Quake Model .iqm
The open, modern replacement the Quake formats never got.
What an .iqm file holds
IQM was designed to be what the Quake lineage was missing: real skeletal animation, a compact binary layout that maps almost directly onto what a GPU wants, and a permissive licence. It is native to Cube 2’s successors and turns up wherever an open engine needed skinned characters without adopting FBX.
Commonly seen in: Cube 2 / Tesseract, Xonotic, open-source engines.
| Data | Stored in IQM |
|---|---|
| Geometry | Yes |
| Materials and colour | Yes |
| Texture maps | Yes |
| Animation and rigs | Yes |
| Scene hierarchy | Yes |
| Read here | Yes |
| Written here | No |
Tested against a real file
The last sweep loaded mrfixit.iqm from Assimp test models with its 2 sidecar files through the viewer on this site: 2,988 triangles across 2 meshes and 2 materials, in 2.5 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.
Convert IQM to another format
Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.
Other things to do with an .iqm file
Questions about IQM
How do I open an .iqm file?
Drop it into the viewer on this site and it opens in the browser, with the scene tree, the materials and the mesh statistics. Nothing is uploaded. If you want it in another program instead, convert it to GLB, which almost everything reads.
Is IQM a good format to archive in?
IQM carries geometry, materials, textures and animation, so an archive copy keeps nearly everything. The usual caveat applies: a format is only as future-proof as the readers that exist for it, and .iqm is well served.
Does converting IQM lose quality?
Geometry is copied vertex for vertex, so the shape does not degrade. What gets lost is whatever the target format has no field for: convert to STL and the materials go, convert to OBJ and the animation goes. The comparison table on each converter page says exactly which.
Formats that hold the same things
Or go back to the full format reference.