Free online PLY viewer
Drop a .ply from a scanner or a photogrammetry tool. A mesh is drawn as a surface with its vertex colours; a file without faces is drawn as the point cloud it is. Nothing is uploaded.
How to open a PLY file
- Drop the .ply on the viewer or click to choose it. ASCII, binary little-endian and binary big-endian files are all read; the header says which, and the panel repeats it.
- Look at the panel first: if it lists triangles, you have a mesh; if it lists points only, the file is a point cloud and is drawn as dots. Vertex colours are used when the file has them.
- Orbit and zoom, and switch Z-up / Y-up if the scan lies on its side — a PLY does not record its orientation, and scanners disagree.
What a PLY holds
PLY was designed at Stanford in the 1990s to store 3D scans, and it still looks like it: a short text header that lists the elements in the file and the properties of each, then the data. A vertex can carry anything the header names — position, a normal, red-green-blue, a confidence value, a laser intensity. Faces are optional, which is how the same extension covers both a finished mesh and a raw cloud of points.
What it has no standard place for is materials and textures. Some tools write a texture file name into a header comment and UVs beside it; nothing obliges a reader to honour that, and this viewer does not. Units are not recorded either: the numbers are metres from one scanner and millimetres from another.
For avatars: a PLY is a static scan with no skeleton and no blendshapes. A head scan in PLY is a good reference to model over, not something that can be exported to VRM as it is.
What this viewer does not do
Faces with three or four corners are drawn; larger polygons are skipped by the loader, so a file made of n-gons shows holes. Texture images named in comments are not loaded. Extra per-vertex properties — intensity, confidence, labels — are read past and not visualised. A 3D Gaussian splat saved as PLY opens as its bare centre points, without the colour, size and opacity that make it a splat; the panel says so when it sees one. Points are drawn at a fixed size on screen, with no surface reconstruction.
Frequently asked questions
My PLY shows only dots. Is it broken?
No — it is a point cloud. A PLY may contain vertices without any faces, which is what a lidar scan or a photogrammetry dense cloud is before meshing. The viewer draws each vertex as a point and says “point cloud” in the panel. To get a surface you need to mesh it, for example with Poisson reconstruction in MeshLab or CloudCompare.
Does it show vertex colours?
Yes. If the vertices have red, green and blue properties they are used directly, for meshes and for point clouds. A file without them is drawn in a neutral grey (or a pale violet for points) so the shape is readable.
Where is the texture?
PLY has no agreed way to reference one. Colour normally lives on the vertices. If your tool exported a .ply plus a .jpg, the link between them is a convention of that tool and is not read here; exporting the same model as OBJ or GLB keeps the texture in a form every viewer understands.
What units are the coordinates in?
The file does not say. Structured-light scanners usually write millimetres, lidar and photogrammetry tools usually write metres, and a photogrammetry result without a scale reference has no real unit at all. The panel gives the bounding-box size in the file's own numbers.
Can it open a Gaussian splat .ply?
It opens, but not as a splat. The file is recognised by its spherical-harmonic properties and only the splat centres are drawn, as plain points. Rendering the splats themselves needs a dedicated splat renderer, which this page is not.
Is my scan uploaded?
No. The file is read from your disk and drawn in your browser. Scans of people and private spaces stay on your machine; the page makes no request with your data in it.
ASCII or binary — does it matter?
Not for the picture. Binary is smaller and loads much faster, which matters once a cloud passes a few million points. Both start with the same readable header, so you can open any PLY in a text editor to see what it claims to contain.
Taking a scan further
The PLY to GLB converter writes a meshed PLY and its vertex colours into a .glb for engines and web viewers. If what you want is an avatar of yourself rather than a scan, VTubeMe builds a rigged VRM from a selfie — that is a different thing from a scan, with a skeleton and a face that moves.