Extract text from VMT files
To convert your VMT file to another format, you need VTFEdit or other Developer software.
To convert other file formats to the "Game Asset Script" file type, you need software like VTFEdit or a similar tool.
A .VMT (Valve Material Type) file is a text-based configuration script used by the Valve Source Engine to define the visual and physical properties of a game surface. Unlike standard image files, a .VMT does not contain pixel data itself; instead, it references external texture files (usually VTF) and dictates how they react to lighting, sound, and physics in games like Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2.
The primary challenge users face is mistaking .VMT files for images. Because they control textures, users expect to open them in Adobe Photoshop or standard image viewers, which results in errors. Additionally, editing these files manually requires knowledge of the Valve KeyValues syntax, and syntax errors can cause purple/black "missing texture" glitches in-game. They are also proprietary to the Source SDK environment, making them difficult to manage on non-development systems.
For documentation or code analysis, the best workflow is converting .VMT to TXT or JSON. This makes the material properties human-readable and parseable by web applications without needing VTFEdit. For archiving game assets, converting to PDF ensures the script data is preserved in a universal format. If you are trying to view the actual image, you must locate the referenced VTF file instead.
Convert.Guru analyzes your VMT file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted VTF, VTM, PNG, VVD, VTX, JPG, ZIP, VMF, MDL, VPK, TXT, RAR and PHY files.
If you want to convert VMT file to PNG, VTF, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF or DAT, you can use VTFEdit or similar software from the "Game Material Definition" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to VMT, try VTFEdit or another comparable tool in the "Game Material Definition" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our VMT converter.