What is a .MDL file?
MDL is a 3D model format used by the Quake and Half-Life engines.
- Did you know
- The MDL format carried the characters of id and Valve’s early shooters.
- The original Quake MDL animated characters by morphing vertices, much like its successor formats MD2 and MD3.
- Valve’s GoldSrc engine reworked MDL for Half-Life, replacing vertex morphing with skeletal animation.
- What Analyser reads
- Header and metadata extraction for 3D meshes, voxels, BIM, point clouds and Gaussian splats: Wavefront OBJ, Stanford PLY, OFF, glTF, AMF, MagicaVoxel VOX, COLLADA DAE/ZAE, USD crate, X3D/VRML, LightWave LWO/LWS, Quake MD2/MD3/MDL, VRM avatars, Siemens JT, LAS/LAZ/PCD/PTS/E57 LiDAR clouds, IFC BIM, and .splat/.spz - vertex/face/point counts, bounding boxes, units and authoring tool.
- Depth of analysis
- .MDL is an identification-grade format: Analyser recognises it from its bytes and decodes the header metadata it carries, rather than opening it in a full viewer. Formats that do get a full viewer are marked "Full" on the formats page.
- Open a .MDL file
- Drag a .MDL file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It is identified entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.