Tiny Online Tools
From points to a printable surface
A point cloud is a list of coordinates, and almost every downstream tool — a slicer, a game engine, a renderer — wants triangles instead. This free online tool reconstructs a surface from LAS, LAZ, PLY, XYZ or PCD data and exports STL, GLB, PLY or OBJ, entirely in your browser.
Typical conversions
- LAS to STL and LAZ to STL — get a scan onto a 3D printer
- XYZ to STL — mesh a plain text point list
- PLY point cloud to mesh — close a photogrammetry scan
- Point cloud to GLB — put a scan on the web with its colours intact
How the reconstruction works
The cloud is wrapped in a uniform voxel grid. Every grid sample records its distance to the nearest point; subtracting a chosen radius turns that into a field which is negative inside the union of balls drawn around the points and positive outside. The surface is the boundary between the two, extracted with surface nets: one vertex per cell that straddles it, one quad per grid edge that crosses it.
The result is closed, manifold and consistently wound, with no normal estimation anywhere in the pipeline. That matters: Poisson reconstruction, the usual alternative, needs per-point normals that all point outward, and guessing them on a noisy scan produces a surface that is confidently wrong in patches. A distance field needs no normals at all.
What the controls do
Grid resolution sets the number of cells along the longest axis, and it is the fidelity ceiling — nothing smaller than one cell can survive. Doubling it costs roughly eight times the memory.
Point radius is the size of the ball drawn around each point, measured in cells. Below about one cell the balls stop overlapping and the surface breaks into blobs; above two cells everything closes but detail softens.
Smoothing runs Laplacian passes over the finished mesh. One pass is nearly free; five will start to shrink thin features.
Be realistic about what this can do
This is a voxel approximation, and the limits are worth stating plainly:
- Fidelity is bounded by the grid. Detail finer than a cell is gone.
- It closes gaps. Anything narrower than the ball diameter gets bridged — including windows, railings and the space between leaves.
- Sharp edges come back rounded, at roughly the ball radius. This is not a CAD reconstruction.
- Scanning only the outside of an object gives you a shell, not a solid: an outer and an inner surface separated by twice the radius.
For the best results, downsample the cloud to an even density first — the Point Cloud Processor does that, along with cropping and outlier removal. Every step, including LAZ decompression, runs locally in your browser.