Convert 3DS to glTF
Convert 3DS to glTF in your browser. The conversion runs on this page and the file never leaves your computer.
Result
Before you convert: what this keeps and what it destroys
Preserved
- The geometry, triangle for triangle
- Overall dimensions and proportions
- Watertightness, where the input is watertight
- Colour
- Separate parts and their positions
Destroyed
- A recorded unit: glTF stores none
Why people convert 3DS to glTF
The readable version of the 3DS rescue. Take it when you are trying to work out what is actually in an old file, because the JSON shows you the meshes, their names and their materials in a form you can read without a viewer.
Its buffer is embedded as base64, which keeps it to one file and costs about a third in size against the GLB.
Everything else matches: the model is rotated from Z-up to Y-up with its winding reversed, material colours become base colours, and the unitless coordinates are read as millimetres and converted into glTF's metres.
What you get
You get a plain-text glTF file you can open in an editor containing the same triangles the 3DS file described. No geometry is added, removed or approximated: mesh-to-mesh conversion is a change of container, and this site's tests check that the triangle count comes out identical.
The output uses metres, as required by the glTF specification.
Carried across: supported base or vertex colour, the supported part structure.
The conversion runs in your browser. Your file stays on your computer and is not uploaded.
What to check afterwards
- 3DS carries no unit. The numbers in the file are just numbers, so the conversion assumes millimetres. Check the overall dimensions of the result before you commit to machining or printing it. A file exported from a package set to inches will be 25.4 times out.
If you need something this conversion cannot give you
This pair loses very little. glTF carries what 3DS carries, so the main reason to choose a different target is what the receiving software accepts.
Going the other way
This site reads 3DS but does not write it. For the reverse conversion, use an application that can export 3DS.
How we know this conversion works
This pair was checked against 3 files from the test corpus on 2026-09-04. Each run parses its own output back in and compares the bounding box, the triangle count and, for closed solids, the volume against the input.
A pair that fails those checks doesn't get a page. That's why this site lists 120 conversions and not the several hundred a format-times-format grid would suggest.