REAssetExplorer

A from-scratch asset explorer, viewer for the RE Engine games Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village (8) (for now).

My goal for this project was to focus on rendering that is faithful to the game, so the standout feature is the visual quality of the display.

Screenshots · Features · Supported Formats · Architecture · Building · Legal

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Overview

REAssetExplorer opens a game's .pak archives directly and lets you browse, preview and inspect assets that RE Engine ships: 3D models with full skeletal skinning, terrain and collision, foliage placement, particle effects, in-game GUI screens with their fonts, localized text tables, Wwise audio banks, AI navigation maps, and the state machines that drive character behavior. All of it renders through a real-time Direct3D 12 viewport that reproduces the engine's own lighting pipeline (G-buffer, light probes, shadows, fog, HDR post-processing) rather than a generic "3D model preview."

The project is split into two layers:

• A C++20 core (Core, Explorer, Renderer, Games, Native) that parses every file format, builds scenes from the game's RSZ component data, and renders everything with Direct3D 12.
• A C# desktop application (UI, built with Avalonia) that hosts that native renderer inside a docked, multi-panel editor and exposes it through a small C ABI (REAssetNative.dll).

Screenshots

quick-around.mp4	passes.mp4
animation.mp4	ui.mp4

Features

3D viewport

• Real-time Direct3D 12 renderer: meshes, materials (.mdf2), and textures.
• Deferred skinning.
• Multi-part character assemblies, a character made of several linked meshes/prefabs is indexed and animated as one unit, exactly like in-game.
• Camera, grid, selection and gizmo tools; an interactive transform gizmo for repositioning objects in a scene.

Animation & state machines

• Parses .mot / .motlist / .motbank animation clips and plays them back on the skeleton.
• Parses motfsm2 / fsmv2 state machines (PlayMotion nodes resolved against motion banks) with a visual graph view.

World, scenes & streaming

• Loads .scn / .pfb / .user scenes and prefabs straight from their RSZ data.
• Terrain (.terr) and mesh collision (.mcol) with the game's own BVH, rendered in a dedicated collision view grouped by collider filter.
• Procedural foliage (.fol) placement, matching the engine's runtime point-baking rather than static instances.
• Scene visibility and LOD streaming that reproduces the game's real rules (terrain rings, DrawOn* radii, room culling via EnvCullingData).
• Parallelized scene prefetching and persistent pak handles for fast load times.

Rendering pipeline

• GPU-driven culling with indirect draw dispatch.
• Deferred lighting: G-buffer, global illumination probes, shadow mapping, height fog.
• Full HDR post-process stack matching the game's own passes: histogram-based auto-exposure, TAA, soft bloom, timeline-driven LUT color grading, FXAA, CAS sharpening.
• A forward pass for glass and other transparents, including the engine's BlurredSolid refraction trick.
• Debug overlays for G-buffer channels, wireframe, bounds and more.

Effects & audio

• EFX particle system playback: billboards, ribbons, meshes, and the game's own particle materials.
• Wwise audio: .bnk bank parsing, .pck sound package indexing, and full .wem decoding (Vorbis conversion + playback) with a waveform view.

Text, GUI & tools

• Localized message table (.msg) browsing and editing.
• GUI scene (.gui) parser with a live preview canvas, including the engine's custom encrypted font format (.oft).
• AI navigation map (AIMP) viewer for battle/encounter scenes.
• Crash dump capture and rotating log files for diagnosing issues in the field.
• In-app thumbnail generation and movie (cutscene) playback.

Supported formats

Category	Extensions	Notes
Archives	.pak (v4)	RE7 and RE8, zstd/zlib compressed entries
Components	RSZ (embedded)	Full type database for both games
Textures	.tex	BC1–BC7 decoding
Materials	.mdf2
Meshes	.mesh, mesh LOD settings
Animation	.mot, .motlist, .motbank
State machines	motfsm2, fsmv2
Scenes / prefabs	.scn, .pfb, .user
Terrain / collision	.terr, .mcol
Foliage	.fol
Particles	EFX (.efx)	Billboard, ribbon, mesh, materials
AI	AIMP (navigation maps)
Audio	Wwise .bnk, .pck, .wem
Text	.msg	Localized message tables
GUI	.gui, .oft (encrypted fonts)
Shader binding metadata	.sdf
Light probes	light probe data

Architecture

Core/       File format readers, hashing, IO, RSZ parsing, pak archive access.
Explorer/   Asset indexing, scene building, LOD/visibility rules, FSM/effect/audio glue
Renderer/   Direct3D 12 renderer: device, pipelines, culling, lighting, post-process, viewport.
Games/      RE7 / RE8 game descriptors (paths, hashes, quirks) implementing a common IGame interface.
Native/     C ABI (REAssetNative.dll) bridging the C++ core to the desktop app: viewport hosting,
            gizmos, audio, movie playback, thumbnails, crash handling.
UI/         Avalonia desktop application (C#): docking layout, asset browser, inspectors, editors.

Explorer depends on Core, Renderer and Games; Native depends on Explorer; UI talks to Native exclusively through the exported rae_* C functions, the desktop app never links against the C++ code directly.

Building

Windows x64 only (the renderer targets Direct3D 12 directly).

Prerequisites

• CMake ≥ 3.28 and a C++20 toolchain (built and tested with MinGW-w64; MSVC should also work)
• Ninja (or any CMake generator you prefer)
• .NET 10 SDK
• A Direct3D 12–capable GPU and driver

1. Build the native core (REAssetNative.dll)

cmake -B cmake-build-release -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build cmake-build-release --target REAssetNative

This fetches zstd, zlib and nlohmann/json automatically via FetchContent.

2. Build and run the desktop app

cd UI/REAssetExplorer.Desktop
dotnet run -c Release

Usage

1. Launch the app and open Settings, then point it at your legally owned RE7 or RE8 installation directory.
2. Browse the asset tree on the left; double-click a mesh, texture, scene, animation, effect, etc. to open it in the appropriate editor panel.
3. Scenes and prefabs open directly in the 3D viewport with real lighting, culling and LOD.

Third-party notices

Some of the REAssetExplorer's file-format readers were ported from REE-Lib, its RSZ type databases come from RE_RSZ, and its .pak file lists from REE.PAK.Tool. Wwise audio decoding uses ww2ogg and stb_vorbis; playback uses miniaudio; texture decoding uses bcdec. The desktop app is built on Avalonia and Dock.

Full license texts and per-file attribution: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

License

MIT