This guide will present how to extract the cs models from the game so you could use them for your personal projects such as skin-making, map creation or animations. It can be fully followed with images alone, but it also contains some tips.
Required software
Simply click “Download Source2Viewer” and run the executable, it’s a portable file and you do not need to install anything in your computer.
Also in order to do anything with those models you’d need a 3D package. I recommend Blender, you can either download it on the official website or directly on Steam!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/365670/Blender/
Accessing the Counter Strike files
Click File > Open > find your Steam download directory > Counter-Strike Global Offensive > game > csgo > scroll all the way down until you find pak01_dir.vpk and open it
Finding models and exporting them
The names of the folders are self explanatory for what kind of content they involve, however pay attention that the weapon models are in weapons > models instead of the models > weapons folder.
Simply open the subfolder of the weapon you want to extract and double click on the name.vmdl_c, pay attention that you do not open the mag version of the file.
Once double clicked the model will load and will appear in a 3D environment. You can navigate around it with WASD, Q and Z to fly up and down and scroll wheel to adjust the speed of the camera, you can right click and drag to rotate it.
Right click your vmdl_c tab and click decompile & export. You used to be able to export the vmdl_c as it is, but after a specific update due to reasons unknown to me the exporter of Source2Viewer or importer of the SourceIO Blender addon stopped working, so we need to use an alternative, which is GLTF (Graphics Library Transmission Format).
Pick export location. Remember to switch export type to GLTF!
The Source2Viewer console will report that the export has been completed and the export folder will now contain those files. The .gltf and .bin files are the model itself, the rest are textures for the CSGO and CS2 weapon models. If you do not need the CSGO model you can delete its textures, they are around 4MB, while the CS2 ones are over 15MB.
Importing in Blender and cleaning up.
You will be met with a polygonal sphere and a rig that seems broken. I personally never needed the rig, so I will delete everything except the model that I want. Expand the folder that ends with .vmdl_c, select the non legacy model in the outliner, take your cursor back to the viewport and press ALT P to clear the influence of its parent and keep its transformations.
The model will already have a material with all the necessary textures which you can inspect in the shader tab.
In order to work comfortably with the model you have to separate it into individual pieces, so it’s a good idea to clean up unimportant data before starting to split it, so you don’t have to do it individually for 70 objects later. I clean the armature modifier and all the vertex groups.
Separation of models.
In order to make this easier for the community I am sharing all of the separated lowpolies I work on in the Counter-Strike Tools discord server.[discord.gg] Simply join the server and grab them in the resource sharing forum. I have worked with half of them so far, and the number is rising.
Alternatively, you can separate them by hovering over faces in the 3D or UV viewport, press L to select linked, press C to enable circle select and pick the faces you have missed, press H to hide and ctrl Z to unhide to toggle between seeing the mesh or not to make sure you have everything, and once you’re done selecting an entire object press P to separate it into a new object. Add it to a hidden folder and continue doing so with every single one of the pieces.
Workshop
I have been creating community content for CSGO and CS2 since 2021 and I post regularly, so if you want to keep in touch with my work you could follow my workshop page.
And that wraps up our share on Counter-Strike 2: Extract in-game models and textures. If you have any additional insights or tips to contribute, don’t hesitate to drop a comment below. For a more in-depth read, you can refer to the original article here by Ein, who deserves all the credit. Happy gaming!