Convert IQM to glTF

What carries over, and what does not

A format conversion is a translation, and translations lose things. Here is what actually happens when an IQM file becomes a glTF file.

This is a comparatively lossless pairing: 5 of the five categories above are supported by both formats, so most of what is in your IQM file has somewhere to go in the glTF file.

About Inter-Quake Model

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. More on the IQM format page.

About glTF 2.0 (JSON)

glTF 2.0 is the Khronos Group’s royalty-free runtime format, often described as "the JPEG of 3D". The .gltf flavour is human-readable JSON that describes the scene graph, and points at binary buffers and image files sitting next to it. It defines a single physically based material model, so a glTF file looks the same in every conforming renderer, which is rare in 3D. Use .gltf when you want to inspect or hand-edit the file, and .glb when you want to ship it.

Commonly seen in: three.js, Babylon.js, Godot, Blender, Adobe Substance 3D. More on the glTF format page.

How the conversion works

When you drop a file in, the bytes are handed to a parser compiled to run in your browser. The IQM data is decoded into an in-memory scene graph of meshes, materials and transforms, which is what the preview is drawing. Pressing convert walks that scene graph back out through a glTF writer and hands you the resulting bytes as a download.

The whole round trip is local. The page itself is static: it is delivered once and then does its work offline. That is why the privacy claim is checkable rather than a promise.

IQM to glTF: common questions