PAZ Unpacker

Executable can be found here Releases A Windows GUI tool for unpacking and extracting files from Black Desert Online (BDO) .PAZ archive files.

This is a community-maintained fork of kukdh1/PAZ-Unpacker.
Full credit for the original work goes to kukdh1. See CREDITS for details.

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Features

• Browse the virtual filesystem inside BDO PAZ archives
• Extract individual files, folders, or entire archives
• Dark mode UI — full dark theme across all controls and windows
• Settings dialog — configure your PAZ folder and extract path once; no dialogs after that
• Load button — one-click load from your saved PAZ folder path
• Extract button — extracts directly to your saved path, no browse dialog if already configured
• Search window — fast non-blocking search across all 800k+ files with live filtering
• Update notice — checks GitHub on startup and shows a clickable link in the status bar when a newer release exists; Help → Check for Updates still works on demand
• File preview — inline DDS/PNG/BMP texture preview panel
• 3D model viewer — textured preview of .pam models, .pac characters and .pcm collision hulls, with orbit / pan / zoom
• Model export — export any .pam to OBJ or FBX, with textures written alongside as PNG
• Character export — rigged, skinned characters to ActorX .psk/.psa or FBX, with the skeleton found automatically and every animation clip written alongside
• Resizable layout — drag the splitter between the file tree and the preview
• Cache — binary cache (v2) for fast startup; embeds folder path for multi-installation support
• Multi-language support (English, Japanese, Korean)
• Displays file metadata: size, PAZ source, internal path

What's new in this fork

The original project was last updated in 2015. This fork modernises the codebase while keeping full compatibility with the original PAZ format.

Foundation

Area	Change
Platform	Upgraded from 32-bit to 64-bit (x64) — handles large archives correctly
Compiler	VS2015 (v140) → VS2025 (v145) with /std:c++latest (C++26)
Memory	Raw pointers / calloc/free → std::unique_ptr, std::vector
Strings	Fixed-size WCHAR[4096] buffers → std::wstring throughout
Paths	Manual CreateDirectory loop → std::filesystem::create_directories
Error handling	Silent failures → std::runtime_error with descriptive messages
Thread safety	Added std::atomic<bool> busy flag guarding all thread spawns
Assertions	assert() precondition checks on all critical parsing functions
Code quality	nullptr throughout, const-correct getters, range-based for loops

3D models (v2.4.0)

The .pam model format used by BDO was reverse engineered for this fork — see PamModel.h for the full layout. All three format versions found in the archive are supported.

Area	Detail
Viewer	Software rasteriser drawing into the existing preview panel — no GPU dependency, no external libraries
Shading	Perspective-correct textured rendering with bilinear filtering and alpha cut-out for foliage and decals
Controls	Drag to orbit, right-drag to pan, wheel to zoom, double-click to reset, middle-click cycles textured / solid / wireframe
Export	Wavefront OBJ (+ .mtl) or binary FBX 7.4; pick the format in the save dialog
Textures	Referenced textures are pulled from the archive and written next to the model as full-resolution PNG

Exports are verified to import into Blender, 3ds Max and Unreal Engine 5.

Characters: skeletons, skinning and animation (v2.6.0)

The rest of the PAR family was reverse engineered too, so a character comes out complete rather than as a static pose:

File	What it holds	Exports as
.pac	Skinned character mesh, with a bone palette	ActorX .psk (default) or FBX
.pab	Skeleton — bone hierarchy and rest pose	FBX
.paa	One animation clip	FBX, or a shared .psa
.pcm	Collision hull	OBJ or FBX

Exporting a .pac also pulls its textures out of the archive, and offers to write the character's animation clips alongside it — a creature has a couple of dozen, a playable class several thousand, so it asks first and tells you how many.

A .pac does not name its own skeleton, so the right .pab is found for you: the archive's naming convention is tried first, then the skeletons nearest the mesh in the folder tree, and whichever one actually accounts for the mesh's bones wins. Across the whole archive 92,236 of 92,498 character meshes resolve a complete skin this way.

Normal maps

BDO ships normal maps in two layouts. The newer ones are ordinary: X in red, Y in green. The older object textures are DXT5nm — X is moved into the alpha channel and red is left at a flat 255 — which is why copying one out verbatim gives a pink, unusable image. Roughly a third of the archive's normal maps are like this.

Exported normal maps are checked and converted, so both eras come out in the form every tool expects. The check reads the pixels rather than the DDS header flag that nominally marks them, because over all 17,056 normal maps that flag is wrong in both directions.

Getting a character into Unreal Engine 5

The mesh imports into UE5 directly from FBX. Animation is the awkward part: UE will not build an AnimSequence from an animation-only FBX. The route that works is the one the modding community already uses — via 3ds Max, letting Autodesk's own FBX exporter write the file:

1. Export the character as ActorX mesh (*.psk) from the save dialog. Every clip is written into a single .psa beside it.
2. In 3ds Max, import the .psk and then the .psa with Gildor's ActorX Importer (gildor.org/projects/unactorx).
3. Export from Max as FBX.
4. Import that FBX into UE5.

Verified end to end on a 91-bone creature: 53,013 verts, a Skin modifier bound to every bone, and 28 of 28 animation clips arriving in UE5 as AnimSequence assets with their original timing intact.

Blender

FBX works directly — mesh, skeleton and animation all import as they are.

If you would rather use ActorX there too, Blender has a PSK/PSA add-on on the official extensions platform: io_scene_psk_psa. The 3ds Max route above is the one verified here, so treat that as the tested path and the Blender add-on as the convenient one.

.psk/.psa is worth using generally — the format is unambiguous where FBX is not, and Max reads it as a real bone hierarchy rather than a pile of dummy helpers.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11 (x64)
• Visual Studio 2025 with the Desktop development with C++ workload
• Windows SDK 10.0

Build

1. Open PAZ-Unpacker.sln in Visual Studio 2025
2. Select Release | x64
3. Build → Build Solution (Ctrl+Shift+B)
4. Copy the four Setting*.xml files alongside the built .exe

Usage

1. Launch PAZ-Unpacker.exe
2. Go to Settings → Configure Paths and set your PAZ folder (the folder containing pad00000.meta) and your preferred extract output folder
3. Click Load to load the PAZ archive — subsequent launches just press Load
4. Browse the file tree on the left
5. Select a file, folder, or the root node, then click Extract
6. Use Search in the menu bar to search across all files by name or extension (e.g. .dds, ui_texture)

Format notes (from original README)

• Tested on KR client. The meta file format changed on KR client since 2016.05 (decrypt key changed).
• If an extracted file begins with 0x6E, the first 9 bytes are a compression header:

  0x6E       : Header magic
  DWORD      : Original file size
  DWORD      : Compressed file size
  

• BDO client (and XIGNCODE3) does not check CRC codes on packed files.

License

Modifications made in this fork are licensed under the MIT License.
The original source code was published without a license — all original rights belong to kukdh1.
See CREDITS for full attribution.

The ActorX Importer referenced above is not part of this project. It is © 2009-2022 Konstantin Nosov (Gildor) and is available from gildor.org/projects/unactorx.