Home > Supported File Formats > LightWave to PLY

How to convert LightWave (.lws,.lwo) to PLY (Stanford .ply)?

PolyTrans|CAD+DCC performs mathematically precise CAD, DCC/Animation, GIS and BIM 3D file conversions into all key downstream 3D packages and file formats. Okino software is used and trusted throughout the world by many tens of thousands of 3D professionals in mission & production critical environments, backed by respectable personal support directly from our core development team.

LightWave

LightWave is a well known and respected DCC/Animation system which has been around since the early days of the Amiga. It continues to be developed by Newtek Inc.

Okino implemented the main system to read and write LightWave .lwo and .lws files as of 1993, with the peak demand for our LightWave converters being throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, after which other animation systems became more popular (3ds Max, Maya and Softimage).

Fortunately a copy of the LightWave software is not needed to convert to/from the .lws and .lwo formats (as otherwise is the defacto case for the 3ds Max and Maya animation systems). The general scene data is stored in the ASCII .lws scene file whereas the binary .lwo file contains the geometry and material information.

PLY

PLY can generally be considered a simple, 1990s-era, university research oriented polygonal (mesh) 3D file format designed to store data from 3D scanners. It was developed by Greg Turk and others in the Stanford graphics. Its design was inspired by the Wavefront .obj format.

PLY was meant to be a simple, easily parsable file format and hence only conveys basic geometry information for a single object definition with polygon vertices, vertex colors vertex normals and UV texture coordinates. No materials nor hierarchy, lights or cameras are supported.

LightWave import converter's overview

PLY export converter's overview