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Game Extractor has had the ability to extract LEGO Digital Designer LIF files for a while, but since Game Extractor isn't very stable, I wrote my own LIF extractor in Python. The download contains the Python source file for use with a python interpreter, as well as Windows 32 bit and Windows 64 bit executables. Download LIF Extractor GitHub For those of you who will probably ignore the Readme.txt file entirely, here's the information on it: You accept full responsibility for how you use this program. This program is released under GNU GPLv3. LIF Extractor is a command line utility for extracting the LIF files found in LEGO Digital Designer. It will extract all files contained inside the LIF archives, into folders adjacent to the archive it was called on. The LIFExtractor.py file requires a python installation to run. The executables found in the folders have no dependencies. Choose the proper folder for your operating system. The Python script has been tested to work on Python versions 2.7 through 3.2. To extract LIF files, pass the path to the LIF files as command line arguments to the program. On Windows, this can be done by dragging and dropping the LIF files onto the LIFExtractor.exe icon in the explorer window. This program was created to allow for interoperability with the LEGO Digital Designer formats. In order to properly read the LEGO Digital Designer formats, it is necessary to access the data contained with the LIF file archives.

I've noticed that people using models ripped from LI1 haven't had the smoothing of them accurate to their appearance in the real game. Maybe this is something that can be done automatically by the extractor at some point (paging @Hamhock666), but for now, here's what to do. In short: The smoothing/vertex normals in LI1 are tied to the materials. I'm not sure whether they're intrinsically tied together in the model format, or if it's just a convention the artists used, but either way, that's how it seems to be done. Certain materials have all the vertices that use them welded together, others leave them flat shaded. This is why there's "duplicate" materials like LEGOWHITE vs LEGOWHITEFLAT; the only difference between them besides the names is the intended shading (smooth vs flat shading). If you want it more step by step...