Irrlicht Scene .irr

An Irrlicht scene: placement and references to the meshes.

What an .irr file holds

An .irr file is an Irrlicht scene description: an XML tree of nodes carrying positions, rotations, scales and material settings, with the actual geometry referenced by filename. That means an .irr on its own is mostly empty; drop the meshes it names in alongside it and the scene assembles.

Commonly seen in: Irrlicht, Irrlicht scene editors.

Data	Stored in IRR
Geometry	Yes
Materials and colour	Yes
Texture maps	Yes
Animation and rigs	No
Scene hierarchy	Yes
Read here	Yes
Written here	No

Tested against a real file

The last sweep loaded scenegraphAnim.irr from Assimp test models with its 4 sidecar files through the viewer on this site: 272 triangles across 2 meshes and 2 materials, in 2.0 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.

Files to bring with it

Drop the .irrmesh, .obj or .3ds files the scene references in together with the .irr.

Convert IRR to another format

Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.

IRR to OBJ IRR to FBX IRR to glTF IRR to GLB IRR to STL IRR to PLY IRR to DAE IRR to 3DS IRR to 3MF IRR to AMF IRR to VRML IRR to USDZ IRR to PCD IRR to XYZ IRR to USDA IRR to OFF IRR to DXF IRR to RAW IRR to X3D

Other things to do with an .irr file

Inspect it in the viewer Compress it Render it to an image Convert it

Questions about IRR

How do I open an .irr 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 IRR a good format to archive in?

IRR stores geometry, materials and colour, texture maps, scene hierarchy. Anything outside that list will not be in the file at all, so archive the original alongside it if the surfacing or the rig matters.

Does converting IRR 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

OBJ 3DS 3MF VRML LWO KMZ AC3D BLEND

Or go back to the full format reference.