Free 3DS (.3ds) to glTF (.gltf) converter — running entirely in your browser. No upload, no signup, no file limits: your files never leave your device.
STEP · IGES · BREP · STL · OBJ · PLY · GLB · glTF · 3MF · COLLADA · AMF · FBX · 3DS · OFF · LAS · PCD · XYZ · PTS
The .3ds format comes from Autodesk 3D Studio for DOS and is one of the oldest mesh formats still in circulation. Despite hard limits — 16-bit vertex counts, 8.3 material names — enormous archives of legacy models exist in .3ds, so being able to read it still matters.
glTF is the Khronos royalty-free standard for transmitting 3D scenes. The JSON variant keeps the scene description human-readable with geometry in sidecar buffers, and the ecosystem — Babylon.js, Unity, Unreal, Blender and the browser engines — treats it as the native interchange format for real-time 3D.
| 3DS | glTF | |
|---|---|---|
| Geometry | Polygon mesh | GPU-ready triangle mesh |
| Units | No | Meters by spec |
| Colors & materials | Basic materials | Full PBR materials |
| Animations | Limited | Yes |
| Typical use | Legacy model archives | Real-time engines & web pipelines |
Yes — free with no accounts, no watermarks and no file-size limits. Conversion runs on your own machine, so there are no server costs behind it.
No. The converter runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly. Your .3ds file never leaves your device, which makes it safe for confidential designs.
Yes — parts and assembly hierarchy are preserved where glTF supports them, and you can optionally merge everything into a single mesh during conversion.
Yes. Every converted model opens in the built-in 3D viewer with an assembly tree, display modes and section views, so you can inspect the result first.
3DS is reduced to geometry, hierarchy and one flat base color per part before export, so format-specific metadata and animation do not carry through. The glTF result contains the converted geometry, hierarchy and flat colors, but it cannot recreate texture maps or animation that were dropped on import.
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