Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your VMT file.
You’ll see a preview, if available.
Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.
Convert VMT to another file type
To convert VMT Materials to another format, you need Valve Source Engine or other Game software.
Convert a file to VMT
To convert other file formats to the "Source Engine Material File" file type, you need software like Valve Source Engine or a similar tool.
About VMT files
A .VMT (Valve Material Type) file is a plain-text configuration file used by the Source Engine to define the surface properties of 3D models and environments. It tells games like Half-Life 2, Portal, and Source Filmmaker how to render a specific texture, including parameters for reflectivity, bump mapping, and surface friction. You can open it using specialized modding software like VTFEdit or any standard text editor like Notepad++. The main disadvantage of the .VMT format is its absolute dependence on the Valve ecosystem. It does not contain any actual image data; it only acts as an instruction set linking to a proprietary VTF (Valve Texture Format) file. This makes it frustrating for users who simply want to view a game texture but are met with lines of code instead. Because it is proprietary, standard image editors and web browsers cannot natively read it, and migrating these materials outside of Valve's software is tedious. To port materials to modern engines like Unreal Engine or Unity, you must parse the parameters and convert the linked texture files. For web use and general viewing, convert the associated textures to WEBP or JPG. For high-quality editing, convert to PNG or TGA.
Convert.Guru analyzes your VMT file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
If you want to convert VMT file to PNG, VTF, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML, TOML, INI, CFG, CONF or DAT, you can use Valve Source Engine or similar software from the "Game Engine 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 Valve Source Engine or another comparable tool in the "Game Engine Material Definition" category.
The VMT Converter Story
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.