AnyFormat

00 OBJ → PLY

OBJ to PLY

Indexed geometry into the research-tool format.

01OBJ in
02PLY out
03Options 3

glTF works in metres and the printing formats in millimetres. Leave this on unless your model comes out a thousand times the wrong size.

Multiplied on top of any unit conversion. Use 25.4 to turn inches into millimetres.

  • No upload The conversion runs in this tab. Your file never travels — not to us, and not to the advertising.
  • No sign-up, no email, no daily cap There is no account system to sign up to.
  • No size limit we invented Only your device's memory — about ~2 GB on a desktop browser, ~400 MB on a phone.
  • Turn your Wi-Fi off and convert anyway The conversion needs nothing but this page. Ads will not load without a connection; your file will still convert. That is the whole claim, and it takes five seconds to check.

Converts OBJ to PLY. Both index their vertices, so the geometry transfers exactly; what changes is which ecosystem will open it comfortably.

A clean transfer

Vertices, indices and face structure map one to one. Quads and n-gons are triangulated, since PLY faces here are written as triangles. Multiple OBJ groups are merged into one mesh, because PLY has no object structure to keep them in.

Materials do not follow

OBJ keeps materials in a separate .mtl; PLY has no material concept at all, only per-vertex properties. If the model's appearance came from a texture, none of it survives — glTF is the format for that.

PLY is the format scanners speak

OBJ came out of computer-aided design and thinks in surfaces and materials. PLY came out of a Stanford scanning project and thinks in measured points, which is why it has first-class per-vertex colour, confidence and intensity while OBJ has none of those. That is the reason to convert in this direction: photogrammetry and scanning tools, MeshLab and CloudCompare among them, treat PLY as their native format and read it with no argument. It is also why the conversion feels lossy in one direction and not the other — you are moving from a format that describes appearance to one that records measurement.

Other names for this

Also searched as “wavefront to ply”.

Questions

Are my groups kept separate?
No. PLY has no object structure, so groups are merged into a single mesh.
What about textures?
PLY has no texture model. Use glTF if appearance matters.
Is my model uploaded?
No. The parsing and rewriting happen in this tab. Models are frequently confidential — an unreleased product, a client’s part, a scan of something proprietary — and none of it is transmitted. Turn your Wi-Fi off and the tool keeps working.