PLY to OBJ

PLY (Polygon File Format / Stanford) is a common 3D-scanner and point-cloud-mesh format. To edit a scanned model in a 3D program such as Blender, Cinema 4D or Maya, you usually want it as OBJ (Wavefront). This tool reads your PLY - ASCII or binary - and writes a clean OBJ with a shared vertex pool and faces.

Both ASCII and binary PLY (little- and big-endian) are recognised. The vertices and faces are read from the PLY and written as OBJ v and f lines; faces keep their original number of corners (OBJ allows polygons, so quads stay quads). The coordinates are carried over unchanged.

Everything runs entirely locally in the browser - your possibly confidential scan never leaves your device. Honestly framed: pure geometry is transferred. PLY vertex colours and extra attributes have no place in a plain OBJ and are dropped; no companion MTL file is produced. An invalid or empty PLY is rejected with a clear message.

Specifications

In 3 steps

1. Drop your PLY file (ASCII or binary).
2. The conversion runs automatically.
3. Download the OBJ (e.g. for Blender).

Limitations: Converts PLY (ASCII and binary, little- and big-endian) to an OBJ file with a shared vertex pool and faces. Pure geometry is transferred - PLY colour and extra attributes are dropped, and no MTL file is produced. If the PLY file carries extra per-vertex normal properties (nx/ny/nz), only x/y/z are read - the OBJ output contains no vn lines. An invalid or empty PLY file is rejected with a clear error.

FAQ

Related tools

PLY to STL · OBJ to PLY · STL to OBJ · OBJ to STL · STL binary to ASCII · STL ASCII to binary