Do textures transfer to PLY?

Not as image textures — PLY has no concept of them. Normals, UVs and vertex colours are preserved; a base-colour map is not rasterised onto the mesh.

Why does the .ply file open in a text editor?

ASCII PLY 1.0 — a plain-text file you can open in any text editor to inspect the vertex data.

Why is the file so much bigger than my GLB?

Because the output is plain text. Each coordinate is written as a decimal number instead of packed binary, which trades file size for readability.

GLB to PLY Converter

Name: GLB to PLY Converter
Author: GLBKit

Convert a GLB to ASCII PLY with positions, normals and vertex colours. Useful for Open3D, PCL and trimesh. Runs in your browser.

Drag & drop your GLB file here

or click to browse

Supported Formats

.glb.gltf.obj.fbx.stl.ply.3mf.off.zip

Format Information

Source Format

GLB.glb

GLB (glTF Binary)

GLB is the binary packaging of glTF 2.0. Meshes, materials, image textures, animation and the node hierarchy are all written into one file, so an asset can be dropped into an engine or a web page without shipping a folder of sidecar files.

What it carries: Vertex positions, normals, UVs and vertex colours, full PBR materials (base colour, metallic/roughness, normal, occlusion, emissive), embedded image textures, node hierarchy, skinning, morph targets, keyframe animation, cameras and lights.

Open a GLB file in the viewer

Target Format

PLY.ply

PLY (Polygon File Format)

PLY is a flexible text or binary format that can describe either a polygon mesh or a bare point cloud, depending on whether the file declares a face element alongside its vertices. That dual nature is why PLY appears in both modelling and LiDAR workflows.

What it carries: Per-vertex position, optional normals, optional RGB colours, optional UVs on mesh PLY files, and face indices. Image textures, material graphs and animation are not part of the format.

Open a PLY file in the viewer

About this conversion

PLY is the format to choose when the next step is a mesh-processing library or a point-cloud tool rather than a renderer. GLBKit writes an ASCII PLY 1.0 file carrying positions, normals and vertex colours where the source has them.

Why convert GLB to PLY

Feed a geometry-processing library — Open3D, PCL, trimesh and CGAL all read PLY directly.
Hand a coloured scan or a processed mesh to a scientific or simulation tool.
Get a plain-text, inspectable mesh you can diff or post-process with a script.

What happens during the conversion

Geometry

The scene is flattened into a single vertex list and face list, with node transforms baked into the positions. Positions, normals and texture coordinates carry over, and faces are triangulated, so any n-gon becomes triangles.

Materials and textures

There are no image textures in PLY. What does survive is per-vertex data: normals, UVs and RGB vertex colours when the source had them. A material's base-colour texture is not rasterised onto the mesh.

Animation

A GLB can hold keyframe animation, skinning and morph targets, and PLY is a static geometry data format with no concept of any of them. The result is the mesh in a single pose — the one the scene was in when it was exported — with no rig left to pose it. Convert to glTF instead if the animation is the point.

Common use cases

Running analysis or cleanup in Open3D, PCL or trimesh.
Converting a coloured web asset into a point-processing workflow.
Producing a simple, dependency-free mesh for a custom renderer.

Limitations of this conversion

Image textures are not transferred. If your model relies on a texture map for its appearance, the PLY will only show vertex colours.
PLY has no material model, so PBR settings have nowhere to go.
The output is ASCII PLY 1.0, which is readable but considerably larger than a binary PLY.

How to convert GLB to PLY

Three steps in the browser. Nothing is uploaded to a server, so an unwieldy file is limited only by your own device's memory.

STEP 1

Drop in your .glb

The single self-contained .glb is read directly, with no .bin or texture folder to locate.

STEP 2

Convert to PLY

Positions, normals and any vertex colours are written into an ASCII PLY 1.0 file.

STEP 3

Load the .ply in your processing tool

If the model looked textured before and flat now, that is expected — PLY carries no image textures.