OneTaskBy Tim King · Updated
PLY Viewer Online
Open Point Clouds and Scanned Meshes in the Browser, Free
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How the PLY / Point Cloud Viewer works
This PLY viewer online opens meshes and point clouds. PLY is the format that 3D scanners, photogrammetry apps and depth cameras produce: a list of points with colours, sometimes joined into a mesh. Drop one on this page and it appears in an orbit viewport, drawn as a coloured point cloud if it has no faces or as a lit mesh if it does, with a point size control, wireframe and lighting options and a PNG export. The file never leaves your browser.
Ply viewer online: meshes and point clouds
A PLY file lists vertices, each with a position and optionally a colour and normal, and may also list faces that connect them. If faces are present the page draws a mesh, lit by the chosen lighting and coloured by the vertex colours when the file has them. If there are no faces, the file is a point cloud and the page draws each vertex as a square dot; the Point size menu sets the dot size in pixels, and choosing a larger size closes the gaps in a sparse scan at the cost of detail. Both binary and ASCII PLY open, and little-endian and big-endian binary are both handled.
Orbit with the left mouse button, zoom with the wheel and pan with the right. Scans often have their origin at the scanner rather than at the object, so the page recentres the model on the ground grid; Fit view repeats that if you lose it.
Colours and lighting
Scanned colour lives in the vertices rather than in a texture, and the page shows it as stored. For meshes, the Lighting menu shades it with a studio rig, soft light or a headlamp, and Unlit shows the raw vertex colour, which is usually the truest picture of the scan. Point clouds are always unlit because a point has no surface to light. The Normals shading colours a mesh by face direction, which reveals inverted faces in a reconstructed surface; Wireframe shows the triangle structure of a mesh and does nothing for a point cloud.
Up axis and units
Photogrammetry tools and scanners disagree about which axis is up. If the scan appears lying on its side, switch the Up axis menu to Z up; the file is not changed. The size in the rail is in the file's own units, which for a scan is typically metres or millimetres depending on the software, and for a photogrammetry model with no scale reference is arbitrary.
Statistics and export
For a point cloud the rail shows the point count and bounding box; for a mesh it shows meshes, triangles, vertices, size and materials. Download PNG renders the current view with the chosen background at preview, retina or 4K width, using your own graphics card. For a point cloud picture, a larger point size and a dark background usually read best.
FAQ
Why does my PLY show as dots instead of a surface?
Because the file contains only vertices and no faces; that is a point cloud. Scanners and photogrammetry tools export point clouds before meshing, and the mesh step is a separate operation in software such as MeshLab or CloudCompare. Increase the point size here to make a sparse cloud look denser, or mesh it in one of those tools and reopen the result.
Where are the colours?
Vertex colours appear automatically when the file stores them as red, green and blue
properties. If the scan is grey here, the exporter did not write colours, or wrote them under
unusual property names the reader does not recognise. Check the file's header (it is plain
text even for binary PLY) for property uchar red and its siblings.
How large a point cloud can this open?
There is no upload limit because nothing is uploaded; the limit is the memory and graphics card of your machine. A few million points load in seconds and orbit smoothly on a modern laptop. Tens of millions will be slow, and hundreds of millions will not fit; subsample the cloud in CloudCompare or the scanner software first.
Can I convert the PLY to STL or OBJ here?
Not on this page; it only displays. MeshLab and CloudCompare are free tools that open PLY and export the other formats, and a point cloud must be meshed before it can become STL, which they also do. Check the exported file in the matching viewer here afterwards.
See also: all 3D Model Viewers tools, Images, Audio, Video & Screen, PDF, SVG, Simulations & Screensavers, Generative Art, Chart Makers, Drawing Pads, Mockups & 3D Making, Diagram Makers, 3D Science, Tracker Music.
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