Inter-Quake Model (IQM) Format
The Inter-Quake Model (IQM) format is a binary skeletal-animation format designed for extensibility, efficiency, and ease of loading. It is intended to serve as a replacement for the aging MD5 and SMD skeletal-animation formats used in Quake-derived and Quake-like 3D engines. It has a companion export-only format, Inter-Quake Export (IQE), which is an extremely easy to export ASCII format that compiles to IQM, while supporting all IQM features, and is inspired by the OBJ format.
IQM Features:
- little-endian binary format for fast loading
- supports variable vertex attribute formats including position, texture coordinates, normal, tangent, blend weights, color, and custom attributes
- space-efficient quaternion animation encoding
- supports non-uniform joint scaling
- allows combined or separate mesh and animation files
- triangle adjacency data
- per-frame bounding boxes
IQE Features:
- ASCII format with only minimal structure for ease of exporting
- compiles to optimized IQM format
- angle-based smoothing, edge-flag smoothing, and smoothing groups
- format descriptions for IQM (version 2) and IQE
- IQM compiler for MD5, SMD, FBX, OBJ, and IQE models
- Blender exporter (versions 2.49, 2.56-2.59, 2.60-2.74, 2.80, and 2.93) for both IQM and IQE formats
- sample code/demos for loading and rendering IQM models
The last release of the IQM development kit supporting version 1 of the format can be downloaded here (iqm-2011-05-24.tar.gz, 2270KB). However, it is recommended that all users move to newer version 2 development kits to avoid quality issues with the animation encoding resolved in version 2.
The latest IQM development kit source code can also be retrieved on github.
Games/3D engines that support IQM:
Other tools for working with IQM:
News
- 06/13/21 - added Blender 2.93 exporter
- 11/04/14 - fixed handling of multiple root bones in FBX importer
- 07/22/14 - added support for overriding bone order in Blender 2.64+ exporters
- 03/15/14 - fixed static linking against libwinpthread with MinGW-w64
- 03/10/14 - fixed FBX texcoord/color parsing and updated documentation
- 10/02/13 - fixed handling of bone names in de-rigify
- 09/01/13 - fixed bug in IQM compiler channel encoding
- 08/20/13 - fixed some exporter typos
- 08/17/13 - fixed some quantization and rounding issues in the IQM compiler
- 07/28/13 - made Blender exporters use the default armature affecting a selected mesh if no armature is selected
- 07/20/13 - fixed triangle adjacency to use position and span all meshes
- 06/12/13 - added support for loading OBJ format in IQM compiler
- 05/24/13 - added support for mesh combining and some preliminary support for loading FBX 7.x formats in IQM compiler
- 02/02/13 - fixed some compilation errors
- 12/23/12 - fixed some bugs in vertex-color-layer-as-alpha handling
- 05/05/12 - updated Blender exporter to 2.63 and made github repository
- 02/17/12 - updated Blender exporter to 2.62
- 01/04/12 - added support for exporting a vertex color layer as alpha in the Blender 2.59 exporter
- 01/03/12 - fixed bug in IQM exporter with vertex colors
- 12/18/11 - fixed bogus IQE base frame in Blender exporter
- 10/16/11 - updated Blender 2.5 exporter to 2.59 and added support for exporting vertex colors
- 10/3/11 - added support for setting animation properties on command-line to IQM compiler
- 8/16/11 - fixed bug in exporter and IQM compiler/upgrader where tangent vectors had wrong sign
- 7/29/11 - fixed exporter and IQM tools to align structs and vertex data to component boundaries
- 7/11/11 - added toggle for exporting non-skeletal models
- 7/9/11 - added support for half type and vertexarray command to the IQE compiler and fixed bug in GPU skeletal animation demo
- 6/23/11 - updated Blender 2.5 exporter to 2.58
- 6/10/11 - added a demo of GPU-accelerated skeletal animation
- 6/5/11 - fixed Blender exporting of different materials within a single mesh and added options for different material name formats
- 5/31/11 - made new revision of the format (version 2) to fix problems with quaternion W coordinate precision
- 5/24/11 - fixed bug in Blender 2.5 exporter causing faulty bone parents
- 4/14/11 - updated Blender 2.5 exporter to 2.57
- 1/28/11 - fixed bug selecting IQE files to export in Blender 2.56
- 1/4/11 - updated Blender 2.5 exporter to 2.56
- 9/11/10 - updated Blender 2.5 exporter to 2.53
- 4/20/10 - finalized version 1 of IQM format
Contact
If you have questions about the format or have any relevant links you would like added to this site, please contact: