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GLBKit

OFF to PLY Converter

Convert a bare OFF geometry file to ASCII PLY with positions and computed normals, for geometry-processing libraries. Runs in your browser.

Drag & drop your OFF file here

or click to browse

Supported Formats

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

Format Information

Source Format

OFF.off

OFF (Object File Format)

OFF is a minimal, human-readable geometry format from the Geomview project: a header line, a count line, then a list of vertex positions and a list of polygon vertex lists. There is deliberately nothing else in the specification.

What it carries: Vertex positions and face index lists, written out as triangles. No normals, no colours, no UVs, no materials, no textures and no animation.

Open a OFF 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

A bare vertex/face list becomes a richer geometry data file. The OFF geometry is written into an ASCII PLY 1.0 file, which carries normals and can carry vertex colour.

Why convert OFF to PLY

  • Load minimal geometry into Open3D, PCL, trimesh or a geometry-processing library.
  • Get a PLY file that can hold vertex colour, unlike the OFF source.
  • Get a named, self-describing header that a script can read field by field, instead of parsing OFF by hand.

What happens during the conversion

Geometry

The vertex positions and faces are written as one PLY vertex list and face list, with faces triangulated and normals computed from the triangles.

Materials and textures

No materials or textures are involved — neither format has them. PLY is written with geometry and normals, and it would be able to carry vertex colour if the source had any.

Common use cases

  • Running repair or measurement scripts on a bare surface, once it has the normals those libraries expect.
  • Moving minimal geometry into a mesh-processing pipeline.
  • Getting a minimal surface into a script that reads a declared property list rather than inferring it from a bare count line.

Limitations of this conversion

  • No colour, texture or material data exists in the source to carry across.
  • Both formats are text, but the PLY adds a per-vertex normal field, so the file is larger than the OFF it came from.
  • Everything is merged into a single mesh, because OFF has no object structure.

How to convert OFF 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.

1
STEP 1

Upload your .off

The plain-text OFF file is read directly, and vertex normals are derived from the face winding before the .ply is written.

2
STEP 2

Convert to PLY

Geometry is written into an ASCII PLY 1.0 file with computed normals.

3
STEP 3

Load the .ply in your geometry library

It is a data file: positions, normals and faces.

Related tools and formats

Frequently Asked Questions

Questions people ask when turning OFF files into PLY.

Looking for a different direction? See every supported conversion.