PLY is what scanners and photogrammetry tools produce; STL is what slicers want. This converter bridges the two in seconds, in your browser, and your scan is never uploaded anywhere.
Three steps, one page, no account. The whole conversion is a local operation — the slowest part is you finding the file.
Drag the file onto the box above. It is read straight off your disk with the browser's File API — no upload, and no progress bar to a server.
The file is parsed, every mesh is baked into world space, and the result is written out in the target format. Your CPU does the work, so a client's unreleased model never leaves the room.
Save the converted file and open it wherever you were headed. Nothing is watermarked and nothing expires.
They solve different problems, which is exactly why one direction of this conversion costs you something and the other does not.
PLY is the Stanford polygon format, and it is what 3D scanners and photogrammetry tools tend to spit out. It stores raw vertices and faces, often with a colour value per vertex rather than a texture map.
STL is the oldest and simplest format in 3D printing, and that is its virtue: a bare list of triangles with surface normals, nothing else. Every slicer ever written opens one without asking questions, which is why the printing world still runs on it.
Every conversion is a trade. Any tool that tells you otherwise is lying to you, so here is the exact ledger before you commit.
Keep the original. This is a one-way trip: if you later want the textured version for a web viewer or a render, you will need the file you started with. Converting back returns the geometry but never the material.
This is the scan-to-print conversion. Almost every 3D scanner, photogrammetry pipeline and research tool writes PLY, and almost no slicer reads it.
Per-vertex colour, which is how a PLY usually stores its appearance, has nowhere to go in an STL and is dropped. Expect a repair pass too — scanned meshes often carry holes and floating shells. Look at it in the viewer first and you will spot both.
You do not have to go back to the home page. Type a prompt or drop an image, and take the .glb — free, anonymous, no watermark.
No. PLY commonly stores a colour value per vertex, and STL has no field for colour at all, so it is dropped. If the colour matters, convert to GLB instead and keep the PLY as the archive copy.
Often not without a repair pass. The conversion preserves exactly what the PLY contained — it cannot add or close holes — and scans routinely arrive with small gaps or loose shells. Run your slicer's repair step before committing filament.
Same converter, same rules: free, in your browser, no signup.
3D AI Studio generates the .glb too — free, anonymous, no watermark.
No signup, no upload, no watermark — and the converter does not care how big the file is.
FreeNo signupNothing uploadedNo watermark
