Irrlicht Mesh .irrmesh
Irrlicht’s XML mesh: vertex buffers you can actually read.
What an .irrmesh file holds
IRRMESH is the Irrlicht engine’s own mesh format, an XML document listing each buffer’s material, its vertices as plain text rows of position, normal, colour and texture coordinates, and its triangle indices. Irrlicht was one of the open-source engines that taught a generation of hobbyists 3D programming, and its example content is still distributed this way.
Commonly seen in: Irrlicht, Minetest lineage, open-source engine samples.
| Data | Stored in IRRMESH |
|---|---|
| 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 spider.irrmesh from Assimp test models with its 3 sidecar files through the viewer on this site: 1,368 triangles across 4 meshes and 4 materials, in 2.0 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.
Convert IRRMESH to another format
Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.
Other things to do with an .irrmesh file
Questions about IRRMESH
How do I open an .irrmesh 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 IRRMESH a good format to archive in?
IRRMESH 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 IRRMESH 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.