Warcraft III Model Viewer

A Windows desktop viewer and exporter for Warcraft III models — classic (SD) and Reforged (HD). Point it at your own Warcraft III installation, browse every model in the game, preview it, and export to .m3 for StarCraft II with its textures converted from Reforged's PBR workflow to SC2's specular one.

The .m3 export is the point of the tool: it replaces the manual CascView → Photoshop → 3ds Max pipeline with a single application.

Status

Working end to end:

• CASC storage — opens a local Reforged install and catalogues 8,408 models and 38,352 textures in ~35 ms.
• MDX parser — classic and Reforged, validated against 86 real models across every race, buildings and heroes with zero defects.
• Textured viewer — DDS decode (BC1/BC3/BC5), multi-layer SD materials and HD team-colour masks flattened per material, filter-mode-aware blending, LOD picker.
• Animation player — double-click a sequence to play; scrub, pause, speed control. CPU skinning of both schemes (classic matrix groups and Reforged 4-weight SKIN), GEOA geoset visibility.
• Effects — particle emitters (PRE2/PREM), ribbons (RIBB) and lights (LITE) are parsed and the particles and ribbons simulated live in the viewer; particle emitters also export as SC2 PAR_ systems. Reforged's own PopcornFX effects (CORN, a third of effect models) are counted and reported rather than converted — their per-particle behaviour is compiled bytecode with no equivalent in a fixed-field emitter. The status bar names what a model carries so an empty viewport reads as a known limit rather than a bug.
• Animated texture flipbooks — HD water, fountains and coral animate their diffuse through a KMTF texture-id track of up to 50 frames. The viewer plays these on the track's own timeline; export resolves the flipbook's first frame instead of falling back to texture 0.
• .m3 export (StarCraft II) — mesh, skeleton, baked animations, attachments, cameras, GEOA visibility, PBR→specular texture conversion, written directly by the app: no Blender, no add-ons, no external tools. Verified in the StarCraft II editor: models load, animate and render textured.
• Copy/paste-ready export layout — the export folder holds an Assets\ folder containing <Name>.m3 and textures\<Name>\*.dds, mirroring the references baked into the file (Assets/textures/<Name>/*.dds) exactly. Merge that one folder into your map or mod root and everything lines up with no renaming. The per-model subfolder keeps several imported units from colliding on a texture filename. Every texture path is read back out of the written file and resolved against what landed on disk, because SC2 draws a layer it cannot find as black rather than reporting anything.
• Bone palette splitting — geosets are split into regions of at most 45 bones. SC2 skins each draw call from a fixed matrix palette, and Reforged geosets routinely reference 80+ bones, which renders correctly at rest but explodes into spikes as soon as anything animates.
• Cut-outs decided per geoset — Reforged marks every HD layer transparent and packs solid body parts and cut-out cards into one atlas, so the material cannot say which is which. Each geoset's UV triangles are rasterised into its diffuse and only the texels it actually samples are measured; a body that reaches no transparent texel stays opaque. This matters because an alpha-blended material leaves SC2's depth-writing pass and then clips through itself. Cut-outs test at Blizzard's own threshold (32, as on raynor's hair) — the feathered band Reforged authors around every strand carries the object's colour, so discarding it thins hair and fur into holes.
• Team colour — verified against the shipping art rather than assumed: Reforged HD units carry no team-colour data (teamColorMultiplier is 0 on every layer of all 102 HD unit models, and their diffuse alpha is coverage, not a mask), so their team colour is already baked into the diffuse by Blizzard. Classic SD units do carry a real mask — an opaque replaceableId 1 layer under the diffuse — which is composited at export using the chosen player slot. See docs/mdx-format-verified.md §5.
• glTF export — skeleton, skinning, PNG textures and every sequence baked as a separate animation, for editing in Blender (re-export .m3 there with m3studio if desired). Verified headlessly: Blender imports the armature, skinned mesh and all actions.
• Custom models — Open file… loads a loose .mdx from disk (Hive Workshop downloads etc.); textures resolve from the model's folder (.blp including JPEG-content, .dds), then by file name anywhere in the folder tree beside it — a download that references Heroes\Human\Drenden\Drenden.blp from the author's own disk still finds the Drenden.blp it shipped, wherever in the package it sits. Stock references come from your game install.
• Texture panel and hand-mapping — the Textures tab lists every reference the model makes, what answered it, and how confident that answer was (beside the model, found by name, game install, or a file you chose). Anything unresolved raises a banner rather than quietly drawing magenta, and … points that reference at a file of your choosing. Mapping happens in the viewer, so you see the result in the preview, and the export uses exactly what you previewed.
• Borrowed game textures are packaged — most custom models ship only the art their author drew and leave every Warcraft III texture they reuse as a bare path. Those are pulled out of your installed game, converted like any other, and written into the export folder, so the package is complete without hunting textures down by hand. Resolution does not depend on the author's spelling: a reference that has been flattened to a file name, re-rooted through war3mapImported\, left as an absolute path from the author's own disk, or written with the source art's extension still finds the right file. Where a name matches several archive files the export log says so and names the one it used, and anything genuinely missing is reported rather than quietly exported as a magenta placeholder.

Requirements

• Windows 10/11, 64-bit.
• A local Warcraft III installation (Reforged, via Battle.net). The tool reads your own game files; it neither downloads nor ships any game content. Its CASC storage contains both the classic and Reforged art, so one install covers both.
• .NET 10 SDK to build from source.

Getting started

1. Download Wc3ModelViewer.exe from Releases and run it. It is a single self-contained file — nothing to extract, no installer, no .NET installation required.
2. It opens your Warcraft III install by itself if it can find one, and remembers the folder you last opened. Otherwise point it at the folder containing .build.info (e.g. C:\games\Warcraft III) and click Open. Everything else waits on this, custom models included — they borrow most of their textures from the installed game.
3. Filter the list, click a model to preview it, double-click a sequence to play it. Open file… loads a custom .mdx from disk instead.
4. Export… chooses formats, geosets, animations, scale and output folder.

To use an exported model in a map: copy the Assets folder from the export into your map's root, merging it with the map's existing Assets folder. Keep the .m3 and its textures\ folder together — the paths baked into the model are resolved from the map root, so a textures\ folder that lands anywhere other than inside Assets\ leaves the model untextured with no error.

Exported models are turned a quarter turn on the way out: Warcraft III builds a model facing +X and StarCraft II expects one facing -Y, so a model exported unturned walks and attacks square to the way the actor points it. A _portrait.mdx carries its camera through as an m3 camera under its original Warcraft III name (Camera01 on most models) — name that camera in the portrait's data or SC2 frames the shot itself.

Windows SmartScreen may warn on first run because the executable is not code-signed. Use "More info → Run anyway", or build from source yourself (see below).

Building

dotnet build src/Wc3ModelViewer.slnx -c Release

x64 only — the bundled native CascLib.dll is a 64-bit build. The single-file release build is:

dotnet publish src/Wc3ModelViewer/Wc3ModelViewer.csproj -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:IncludeNativeLibrariesForSelfExtract=true -p:IncludeAllContentForSelfExtract=true -p:EnableCompressionInSingleFile=true

Layout

Path	What it is
src/Wc3ModelViewer.Core	Storage, format parsers, conversion. No UI dependencies.
src/Wc3ModelViewer	WPF app: browser, Helix viewport, export dialog.
spike/CascProbe	Proves CASC access and dumps the storage's real path spellings.
spike/MdxProbe	Dumps raw MDX structure; --validate N parses N real models and checks them.
spike/m3verify	Validates exported .m3 against m3studio's structures.xml (headless Blender import).
docs/mdx-format-verified.md	The format reference this code is written against.
native/CascLib.dll	Prebuilt 64-bit CascLib.

A note on the format documentation

Reforged build 2.0.4 does not match the published MDX specifications — the wowdev wiki and TaylorMouse's 3ds Max scripts both describe older builds. docs/mdx-format-verified.md records what the shipping files actually contain, derived by parsing them; where it disagrees with an external source, it was checked against real bytes and it wins. Re-run spike/MdxProbe after a game patch rather than assuming the layout held.

Third-party components

• CascLib by Ladislav Zezula (MIT) — reads Blizzard CASC storages.
• Helix Toolkit (MIT) — WPF 3D viewport.
• The Reforged material and animation conventions were cross-checked against TaylorMouse's Warcraft III Reforged tools, ReterasModelStudio and mdx-m3-viewer.

Legal

A fan-made tool for viewing and converting assets from your own legally purchased copy of Warcraft III. It ships no game assets and cannot download any. Warcraft and StarCraft are trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Do not redistribute exported game assets; keep them for personal/modding use as permitted by Blizzard's EULA.

License

MIT — covers this tool's code only, not the third-party components or any game content.