FAQ

No. Conversion runs in your browser. Your E57 and PLY files are not uploaded to 3D Convert for conversion.

E57 is an ASTM standard file format for storing 3D imaging data such as laser-scanner point clouds, often with colour, intensity, and poses. See What is an E57 file?

PLY (Polygon File Format) is a common format for 3D points and meshes. Many viewers and pipelines accept binary PLY point clouds. See E57 vs PLY.

Open the E57 to PLY tool, drop your .e57 file, choose scans and options, then convert. The PLY is written on your device. Full walkthrough: How to convert E57 to PLY online.

Once the page is loaded, conversion does not need the network. A single-file build also works from disk for offline use.

The converter streams the file instead of loading it all into memory, so multi-gigabyte scans are practical. Browser storage limits still apply in some browsers when the File System Access save dialog is not available.

Chrome and Edge support choosing a save location and writing the PLY as it is produced. Firefox and Safari work but may stage the file differently.

When every selected scan has RGB, colour is written to the PLY. Intensity can become greyscale or a separate scalar field, depending on options.

Ads help keep the tools free to use. Advertising is separate from file conversion. See the privacy policy.

The mesh converter reads OBJ, STL (binary and ASCII), PLY (ASCII, binary little- and big-endian, including triangle strips), OFF and its COFF/NOFF/STOFF variants, and glTF/GLB. It writes OBJ, STL, PLY, OFF and GLB — so any of those can become any other. See the format comparison.

Colour, texture coordinates and per-vertex normals, because STL stores only triangles. Polygons with more than three corners are split into triangles, and each facet normal is recomputed from its winding. The tool says so before you start.

Two reasons, both faithful to the source. STL has no vertex index, so converting to STL writes three positions per triangle and converting from one gives three vertices per triangle. And an OBJ whose texture or normal indices differ from its position indices genuinely has more corners than positions, so each corner becomes its own vertex. See STL to OBJ.

No. Welding needs a distance tolerance, and choosing it wrong either leaves cracks or fuses parts that should stay apart — so the converter gives you exactly the geometry the file held and leaves that decision to a tool where you can set the tolerance yourself.

CAD interchange formats such as STEP are planned as additional browser tools on the same hub.