PLY Viewer

View PLY files and point clouds online

This PLY viewer opens .ply files in the browser, whether they contain a triangle mesh or only points. Drop the file on the page to see the scan with its colors. Nothing is uploaded, so you can open scans of people, buildings or private spaces without sending them anywhere.

ASCII and binary PLY files both work, and vertex colors are shown. A PLY that has vertices but no faces is displayed as a point cloud.

Where PLY files come from

PLY, the Polygon File Format, is also known as the Stanford Triangle Format. It was developed at Stanford University in the mid-1990s to store data from 3D scanners, and the well-known Stanford Bunny test model is distributed as PLY.

It is still the everyday format for 3D scanning and photogrammetry. Handheld and structured-light scanners, phone scanning apps, MeshLab, CloudCompare, Open3D and photogrammetry pipelines such as COLMAP and Meshroom all read or write it.

A PLY file starts with a short text header that lists its "elements" (usually vertex and face) and their properties (x, y, z, and often red, green, blue, nx, ny, nz). The body that follows is either text or binary. Because the header can declare any property, PLY files vary a lot from one program to the next.

Vertex positions

Always present. Shown.

Vertex colors (red, green, blue)

Common in scans. Shown.

Faces

Optional. With faces you get a mesh; without them, a point cloud.

Normals

Optional. Used for shading when present.

Texture images

Not part of the standard. Some programs name a texture in a header comment; this viewer does not load it.

Custom properties

Confidence, intensity and other scanner-specific values. Ignored for display.

Point clouds versus meshes

A raw scan or a photogrammetry dense cloud is a set of points with no surface between them. Such a PLY has a vertex element and no face element. The viewer draws each point as a dot, which works well for checking coverage and color but looks sparse when you zoom in close.

Turning points into a surface (meshing, for example with Poisson reconstruction in MeshLab or CloudCompare) is a separate step that this viewer does not perform. Because a point cloud has no triangles, it also cannot be converted to STL, OBJ or USDZ; the converter will tell you so. It can be saved as PLY, GLB or glTF.

Gaussian splatting scenes are often saved as .ply too. They store each splat's position along with shape and color coefficients rather than plain red, green and blue values. This viewer shows them as a cloud of points at the splat positions, without colors and without the splat look.

Viewing tips for scans

PLY files open Z-up by default, the convention of most scanning, CAD and 3D printing tools. Some scanning apps and photogrammetry programs write Y-up instead; if your scan is lying on its side, use the up-axis toggle.

The bounding-box size in the info panel is shown in the file's own numbers. PLY has no unit field: scanner software commonly writes meters or millimeters, so a room scan reading 4 x 3 x 2.5 is likely in meters.

A dense scan can contain tens of millions of points. Binary PLY loads much faster than ASCII and uses less memory on the way in. If a big file struggles on a phone, try it on a desktop.

Saving a PLY in another format

Use "Download as" to save a PLY mesh as STL, OBJ, GLB, glTF or USDZ. For 3D printing a scanned object, STL is the usual target. STL has no color, so vertex colors are dropped; make sure the scan is a closed mesh before printing.

To prepare a scanned mesh for printing, use PLY to STL.