Tiny Online Tools
Getting a cloud into the format your tool expects
LiDAR arrives as LAS or LAZ. Photogrammetry produces PLY. Robotics code wants PCD. Research scripts read plain XYZ text. Nothing agrees, and the usual answer is installing PDAL or CloudCompare just to change a container. This free online point cloud converter does it in the browser.
Supported conversions
- LAS to PLY and LAZ to PLY — get survey data into a mesh-processing tool
- LAS to XYZ and LAZ to XYZ — plain text for scripts and spreadsheets
- PCD to PLY and PCD to XYZ — move Point Cloud Library output elsewhere
- PLY to XYZ — strip a scan down to bare coordinates
Downsampling, and why the method matters
A raw survey is frequently far denser than any downstream step needs. How you thin it changes what survives.
Voxel grid divides space into cubes and keeps one point per occupied cube. The result has uniform density everywhere, regardless of how unevenly the original was sampled — scan lines close to the sensor no longer dominate. This is the right choice before meshing, surface reconstruction or feature extraction, because those algorithms assume roughly even spacing.
Every Nth point simply keeps one point in N. It is fast and preserves the original density distribution, so dense regions stay dense and sparse regions stay sparse. Fine for a quick preview; wrong for anything where spacing carries meaning.
The voxel size is set as a fraction of the cloud's own extent rather than in absolute metres, because 5 cm is enormous for a scanned object and invisible for a county-wide survey.
Why you cannot write LAS here
This tool reads LAS and LAZ but does not write them, and that is deliberate.
A LAS file is only meaningful with a correct header: the coordinate reference system, the scale factors and offsets that reconstruct real-world coordinates, the point data record format, the classification semantics. A converter that takes an XYZ text file and invents those fields produces something that looks like valid LAS and is quietly wrong — which is worse than refusing.
PLY and XYZ make no such claims. They store points, and that is all they promise.
A note on coordinates
LAS files usually store coordinates in a projected CRS, with values in the hundreds of thousands of metres. Rendering those directly causes floating-point precision problems, so the cloud is recentred on its bounding box when loaded — and the exported file inherits that centring.
The tool reports the exact offset that was subtracted. Add it back if you need the original coordinates, or keep the centred version if you are heading into a modelling tool that would rather work near the origin anyway.
Privacy
LAZ decompression and all conversion run locally through WebAssembly and JavaScript. Survey data never leaves your machine.