PLY to STL Converter
Convert a scanned PLY mesh to STL, colours and scanner extras stripped.
Built and maintained by Matúš Koleják, Co-Founder, TechDraw AI
Updated
Drop a file here. It never leaves your browser.
No sign-up · no upload · no watermark · no file size limit · STL first, 3MF and OBJ one click away
Have a different file? 3MF to STL Converter · OBJ to STL Converter · ZIP to STL Converter · G-code to STL Converter
How to convert a PLY to STL
Add your PLY
Drop a PLY onto the tool, or click to choose one. It is read in your browser and never uploaded.
Check the preview
Drag the model to turn it. The triangle count, the number of parts and the size in millimetres are shown under it, so a unit problem is visible before you download.
Download STL
Click Download STL. No account, no watermark, no waiting. 3MF and OBJ come off the same file with one more click.
What happens to your file
The PLY header is read first, because it is what makes the body readable: it declares every element and property in order, so the reader can walk past whatever colours, normals, confidence and intensity values the scanner also wrote and still land on the coordinates. ASCII, binary little-endian and binary big-endian all work. Faces are triangulated and written as STL. A PLY holding only points and no faces is refused with an explanation, because a point cloud has no surface and no honest converter can invent one.
Starting from a photo or a drawing instead of a mesh? That is the image to STL converter, and a 2D outline becomes a solid on the DXF to STL converter.
About formats
PLY (the Polygon File Format, also called the Stanford Triangle Format) came out of Stanford's graphics lab in the mid-1990s, designed to store the output of a 3D scanner rather than the output of a modeller. Its defining idea is a self-describing header: the file declares each element and each of its properties in order, so a reader can walk a body it has never seen before. That is why a PLY from a scanner can carry per-vertex colour, normals, confidence and intensity alongside the coordinates, and why two PLY files from different scanners can look nothing alike inside while both being perfectly valid. The body is ASCII or binary, little or big endian, and faces are a list property so each one states its own corner count. The trap when converting is that a PLY need not contain any faces at all: a raw scan is often a point cloud, a bag of measured points with no surface, and no converter can turn that into an STL without a reconstruction step that is a separate job entirely.
- Developer:
- Stanford University
- Initial release:
- 1994
Frequently asked questions
How do I convert a PLY file to STL?
Drop the PLY onto the tool on this page and click Download STL. It is read and converted by JavaScript running in your browser, so there is nothing to install, no account to make and no queue to wait in. 3MF and OBJ come off the same file with one more click.
Is this PLY to STL converter free?
Yes. Free, no watermark, no file size limit, and no account needed to convert or to download. There is no paid tier of this tool to upsell you to.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is opened by code running in your browser tab and never sent to a server, which also means nothing is stored, logged or scanned. You can disconnect from the internet once the page has loaded and the converter keeps working. For a client's part under NDA that is the difference between usable and not.
My PLY will not convert. Why?
Almost always because it is a point cloud rather than a mesh. A raw scan is often just measured points with no faces joining them, and there is no surface in the file to turn into triangles. Getting from points to a mesh is a reconstruction step, done in MeshLab (Poisson surface reconstruction) or your scanner's own software, and it involves choices no converter can make for you.
Are the scan colours kept?
No. Per-vertex colour is common in PLY files from scanners and is read past, because STL has nowhere to store it. The geometry is unaffected.
Is there a file size limit?
None imposed by the tool. The practical limit is your own machine's memory, since the file is held in the browser tab; a few hundred megabytes is fine on a desktop and less so on a phone. Nothing is queued or throttled because there is no server involved to queue it.