Convert 3DS to OBJ
Convert 3DS to OBJ 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: OBJ stores none
- Colour
- The separation between parts, merged into one body
Why people convert 3DS to OBJ
Two formats from the same era, one of which aged much better. This is the usual first move when an old asset pack needs to go anywhere modern.
The geometry transfers directly and object names come with it. Expect several meshes where you might have expected one: 3DS uses 16-bit vertex indices and caps a mesh at 65,536 vertices, so any detailed model was chopped up by the exporter decades ago.
The site rotates the model on import, because 3DS is Z-up and OBJ is used Y-up, and it reverses the triangle winding as it does. Without that second step mirroring the coordinate system would turn every surface inside out. Material colours are dropped, since the OBJ is written without a material library.
What you get
You get a plain-text OBJ 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.
Carried across: object names, with positions applied to the geometry.
Not carried across by this conversion: a recorded unit, colour.
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.
- The output keeps supported geometry and object names. The writer applies part transforms to the coordinates, without retaining the original transform hierarchy. It does not write material colours, texture coordinates or a companion material file.
If you need something this conversion cannot give you
If the unit has to be unambiguous, convert to 3MF instead. It records the unit in the file, so nobody downstream has to assume millimetres and nobody has to scale by 25.4 after the fact.
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.