My PLY was a point cloud. Why is the GLB not a surface?

Because a point cloud has no faces. The converter preserves what is there — points, normals and colour — rather than fabricating triangles. Surface reconstruction is a separate step.

Do PLY vertex colours carry over?

Yes. Per-vertex RGB is written into the GLB, which is usually why a scanned PLY keeps its appearance. PLY has no image textures, so none are transferred.

Why can't I convert a PLY to OBJ here?

Because a PLY may be a bare point cloud, and OBJ is a triangle mesh format with nowhere to put unconnected points. The converter offers only targets that can represent what a PLY might contain.

PLY to GLB Converter

Convert a PLY mesh or point cloud to a self-contained GLB, keeping normals and vertex colour. Points stay points. Runs in your browser.

Drag & drop your PLY file here

or click to browse

Supported Formats

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

Format Information

Source 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

Target 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

About this conversion

PLY into a modern, self-contained scene format. The mesh or point set is read and written as a GLB, so a scan or a coloured PLY can be opened in a browser or an engine as a single file.

Why convert PLY to GLB

View a PLY scan or coloured mesh in a proper 3D viewer instead of a text editor.
Load PLY geometry into a web scene, a game engine or an AR experience.
Store a colour-bearing PLY as one file rather than a data dump.

What happens during the conversion

Geometry

A mesh PLY keeps its vertices and faces; a point-cloud PLY is written as a point set, because the faces simply do not exist. In both cases the result is a single GLB mesh with normals preserved where the PLY supplied them.

Materials and textures

Image textures are not transferred, because PLY has none. Per-vertex RGB colour is, and that is what gives a converted PLY its colour in the GLB. There is no material model on either side.

Common use cases

Inspecting a LiDAR or photogrammetry PLY in a browser.
Moving a coloured scan into a real-time or AR project.
Sharing a PLY asset as a single self-contained file.

Limitations of this conversion

PLY point clouds convert to points, not surfaces. If you expected a watertight mesh, that has to be generated separately — the converter will not invent faces.
Only visible objects are written, so anything hidden in the source .ply scene is left out of the .glb.
A mesh PLY converts cleanly; a point-cloud PLY will look like scattered points in the GLB, which is correct rather than a fault.

How to convert PLY to GLB

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 your .ply

Both mesh and point-cloud PLY files are read, in ASCII or binary.

STEP 2

Convert to GLB

Vertices, faces where they exist, normals and vertex colour are written into one binary glTF.

STEP 3

Open it in the GLB viewer

Check whether your PLY was a mesh or a point cloud — that determines what you should see.