Free Online 3D File Viewer
Open and inspect 3D models and point clouds directly in your browser. No upload to any server — everything runs locally on your device.
Supported Formats
PLY
Polygon File Format — point clouds and meshes with vertex colors
PCD
Point Cloud Data — standard format from the Point Cloud Library
STL
Stereolithography — widely used in 3D printing and CAD
OBJ
Wavefront OBJ — common interchange format for 3D models
GLB/glTF
GL Transmission Format — modern web-ready 3D format with materials
XYZ
Simple text-based point cloud format with X, Y, Z coordinates
How It Works
- Drag and drop a 3D file (or click to browse)
- The file is read entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded
- The model appears in the viewer — drag to orbit around it, scroll to zoom in and out, and right-click and drag to pan across it.
- Use the toolbar to toggle grid, wireframe, or enter fullscreen
Your files never leave your computer
Nothing you open here is uploaded. When you drop a file in, your browser reads it straight off your own disk and draws it on your own screen; the contents never travel to us or anyone else. There is no account to create, no file list building up somewhere, and nothing to go back and delete afterwards — closing the tab is the whole clean-up. That matters if the model on your screen belongs to a customer. Prototype parts under an NDA, a memorial portrait, a client's product before launch: you can check the file opens and looks right without adding another company to the list of people who have handled it. The one practical limit is that a very large file is bounded by your own machine's memory rather than by us.
PLY
PLY stores a bare list of points: an X, Y and Z for each one, usually a color, and optionally the triangles that join them into a surface. It is what photogrammetry apps write after rebuilding a scene from a set of photographs, what most handheld 3D scanners save, and what subsurface crystal engraving runs on, where every point becomes one laser dot inside the glass. This viewer opens a PLY as its points, so a scan arrives as a dense color cloud rather than a solid shell. If you want a point size slider and color modes, open it in the point cloud viewer instead.
PCD
PCD is the house format of the Point Cloud Library, and it turns up wherever robotics and depth-sensing tooling has been involved — LiDAR units, depth cameras, mobile scanning rigs. A short readable header at the top declares which fields each point carries, so one file might hold position only while another adds color, surface normals, or a return intensity from the scanner. The body can be plain text or binary. It has no concept of faces or materials, so a PCD is always drawn here as points, and it is worth opening one before conversion just to confirm the scanner actually recorded color.
STL
STL is the plainest mesh format in common use: a long list of triangles, three corner points and a facing direction each, and nothing else. No color, no texture, no material, and — the part that catches people out — no declaration of units, so the same numbers can mean millimeters in one program and inches in the next. Files come out of CAD packages, slicers, and every 3D printing workflow. Because the format carries no surface color, an STL always renders here as a plain gray solid; that is the file, not a fault in the viewer.
OBJ
OBJ is a plain-text mesh format that has been readable by nearly everything for decades. The file itself lists vertices, texture coordinates and faces, and it usually names a companion .mtl file that holds the materials, which in turn points at image files for the textures. That split is the thing to watch: send someone an OBJ on its own and the shape survives while the color does not. Files typically come from modeling and sculpting apps, scanner software, and 3D asset libraries. This viewer draws the geometry, so an OBJ opens as untextured shading.
GLB/glTF
GLB packs an entire scene into one binary file — geometry, materials, textures, and the transforms that position each part — which is why it has become the format of choice for moving a finished model between apps and onto the web. It is what Mesh Studio hands you when you want a model with its color intact. The .gltf variant holds the same structure as readable JSON, but it commonly references separate .bin and image files sitting beside it, so it only travels correctly as a folder. When in doubt, export GLB.
XYZ
XYZ is about as simple as a 3D file gets: one point per line of plain text, three numbers for position and sometimes three more for color. There is no header, no units, and no metadata, which makes it wonderfully portable and completely dependent on what the exporting program decided each column meant. It shows up in surveying and LiDAR output, scientific datasets, and as the common denominator when one piece of point cloud software has to hand data to another. Files stay small in point count but large on disk, because every coordinate is written out as text.
When something looks wrong
- My PLY opens with no color at all
- The file almost certainly has no color to show. PLY only carries color if the exporting program wrote a value for every point, and plenty of scanners and CAD tools save geometry alone. Reopen the export with color or vertex colors enabled if the option exists. STL and OBJ files never carry color in this viewer either, so gray is expected there.
- The file loads but the screen stays black
- Check the counts in the bar above the viewer first. If they read zero, the file parsed but held no geometry — the usual cause is a .gltf that references separate .bin or texture files that did not come with it, so re-export as a single GLB. If the counts look right, press the reset camera button, which returns the view to its starting frame.
- My model looks microscopic, or fills the whole screen
- Every file is automatically scaled to fit the grid, so size on screen tells you nothing about real dimensions. A model that still looks like a speck usually has one stray vertex far from the rest — a CAD datum, or scan noise — stretching the bounds. Units matter downstream instead: STL and XYZ record no units, so set them in your laser or slicer software.
Questions about this viewer
- Is it free, and do I need an account?
- It is free and there is no sign-up. Open the page, drop a file in, look at it. You do not need a LaserTools account for this tool at all — an account is only for the studios, where the AI work happens. Nothing here is watermarked and nothing is held back behind a plan.
- Can I convert a file to another format here?
- No — this page opens and inspects files, it does not write them. Conversion lives in Mesh Studio, which exports GLB, OBJ, STL, PLY and DXF. Use the viewer first to confirm a file is intact and oriented the way you expect, then take it into the studio when you want a different format out the other side.
- How large a file can I open?
- The drop zone lists the accepted formats and the size cap it will take. In practice the real ceiling is your own device: a model with millions of triangles or points opens fine on a desktop and will feel slow on an older laptop or a phone, because all the work happens locally. If it stalls, export a lighter version with fewer triangles or points.