Do UVs carry over to PLY?

Yes, when the source geometry has them. What does not carry over is the image texture the UVs would have sampled — PLY has no concept of one.

Why is the PLY file ASCII?

Readable text, so you can inspect or post-process the vertex data directly. The trade-off is file size.

Can PLY hold point clouds?

Yes, the format can — and this converter can write a point-style PLY when the source scene is a point cloud. A glTF scene, however, is a mesh, so you will get faces.

glTF to PLY Converter

Name: glTF to PLY Converter
Author: GLBKit

Convert a glTF asset to ASCII PLY with positions, normals and vertex colours for geometry-processing tools. Runs in your browser.

Drag & drop your GLTF file here

or click to browse

Supported Formats

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

Format Information

Source Format

glTF.gltf

glTF (JSON)

glTF 2.0 in its JSON form. The .gltf file is a readable text document that describes the scene and references an external .bin buffer plus separate image files, so a finished asset is a folder rather than a single file.

What it carries: The same scene data as GLB — PBR materials, image textures, node hierarchy, skinning, morph targets, keyframe animation, cameras and lights — but expressed as external file references instead of an embedded payload.

Open a glTF 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

The move from a scene format to a data format. GLBKit writes an ASCII PLY 1.0 file containing positions, normals, texture coordinates and any vertex colours — the shape a geometry-processing library actually wants.

Why convert glTF to PLY

Load the model into Open3D, PCL, trimesh or a similar geometry library.
Handing a coloured glTF asset to a scientific visualisation or simulation tool.
Get a plain-text mesh you can inspect, script against or diff in version control.

What happens during the conversion

Geometry

The scene is flattened into one vertex list and one face list, with node transforms baked into the positions and faces triangulated. Positions, normals and texture coordinates all carry across when the source geometry has them.

Materials and textures

Image textures are not transferred. Per-vertex data is what survives: normals, UVs and RGB vertex colours when the source used them. A base-colour texture is not rasterised onto the mesh.

Animation

glTF animation, skinning and morph targets have no representation in PLY, so a single static pose is written.

Common use cases

Running geometry analysis and cleanup in an Open3D or PCL script, once the node structure has been flattened away.
Converting a coloured web asset into a point or mesh processing pipeline.
Producing an inspectable, scriptable text mesh.

Limitations of this conversion

There is no material model and no image textures in a PLY, so the glTF's PBR graph disappears entirely. Positions, normals and vertex colours are written when the source has them.
The output is ASCII rather than binary, so a large textured scene converts to a noticeably bigger file than the glTF it came from.
Animation clips and morph targets are dropped, because PLY stores static geometry only.

How to convert glTF 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

Upload the full glTF asset

Zip the .gltf, .bin and images together so nothing is missing.

STEP 2

Convert to PLY

The glTF's meshes are flattened and written as one ASCII PLY 1.0 vertex and face list.