AnyFormat

00 PLY → OBJ

PLY to OBJ

Text output that Blender, Maya and Cinema 4D all read.

01PLY in
02OBJ out
03Options 2

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 PLY to OBJ so a general 3D application can open it. OBJ is read by Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D and effectively everything else, which PLY is not.

Vertex colour has nowhere to go

This is the one real loss. PLY's per-vertex colour is exactly what makes a photogrammetry scan look like the thing it scanned, and standard OBJ cannot store it — colour in OBJ lives in a .mtl file and applies per material, not per vertex.

Some tools write extra numbers after the vertex coordinates as an unofficial colour extension. It is not part of the format, most readers ignore it, and some refuse the file outright, so it is not written here.

To keep the colour, stay in PLY, or convert to glTF where vertex colours are a first-class attribute.

Both PLY encodings are read

ASCII and binary, little-endian and big-endian, with whatever property order the header declares — scanners vary considerably in what they write and in what order. The properties that matter for OBJ are position and faces; the rest are read and discarded.

Faces that are not triangles

PLY allows a face to have any number of vertices, and scanning software sometimes emits quads or larger polygons. OBJ allows the same, so those cross over as they are rather than being triangulated. What that means in practice is that the result can open fine in Blender and refuse to load somewhere stricter, since plenty of engine importers accept only triangles. If a downstream tool rejects the file, triangulating before export is the fix, and it is a change to the geometry rather than to the file format.

Other names for this

Also searched as “ply to wavefront obj”.

Questions

My scan lost its colours.
OBJ has no per-vertex colour. Keep the PLY, or convert to glTF where vertex colour is standard.
It says my file is a point cloud.
It has no faces. OBJ can hold bare vertices but nothing will render them as a surface — reconstruct a mesh first in MeshLab.
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.
How large a model can I convert?
There is no imposed limit; the ceiling is your device’s memory. A desktop browser handles files of roughly 2 GB and a phone about 400 MB. A 200 MB STL — around four million triangles — converts in a few seconds on a laptop.