Convert TER to PCD
Free, in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Drop your .ter file in and take the .pcd away.
Drop your TER file here
.ter in, .pcd out
Choose filesNothing is uploaded No account, no email No file size limit
How to convert TER to PCD
- 01
Add your .ter file
Drag your Terragen Terrain file onto the drop zone, or click it to browse. Nothing is uploaded: it is read where it already sits.
- 02
Check the preview
The model is parsed on your machine and drawn in the viewport, so a wrong axis or a missing texture shows up before you commit rather than downstream.
- 03
Save the .pcd file
Press convert. The Point Cloud Data file is written in the tab and lands in your downloads folder. No link, no expiry, no account.
What carries over, and what does not
A format conversion is a translation, and translations lose things. Here is what actually happens when a TER file becomes a PCD file.
| Data | TER | PCD | Survives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geometry | Yes | No | Dropped |
| Materials & colour | No | No | n/a |
| Texture maps | No | No | n/a |
| Animation & rigs | No | No | n/a |
| Scene hierarchy | No | No | n/a |
This is a comparatively lossless pairing: 0 of the five categories above are supported by both formats, so most of what is in your TER file has somewhere to go in the PCD file.
What our PCD writer puts in the file
The vertices of the model as an ASCII point cloud with packed RGB. Triangles are not written, because PCD has nowhere to put them.
About Terragen Terrain
TER is Planetside Software’s terrain format for Terragen, and it stores landscape as a regular grid of 16-bit elevation samples with a base height and a scale rather than as triangles. Converting one builds the mesh the grid implies: two triangles per cell, with the file’s own horizontal and vertical scaling applied so the proportions are right.
Commonly seen in: Terragen, World Machine exports, matte painting and environment work. More on the TER format page.
About Point Cloud Data
PCD is the native format of the Point Cloud Library and the usual output of lidar scanners, depth cameras and ROS robotics stacks. It stores points with optional colour, intensity and normal fields in ASCII, binary or compressed binary layouts. There are no faces in a PCD file; converting it gives you a point cloud in the target format, not a surface.
Commonly seen in: PCL, ROS, CloudCompare, Open3D, lidar and depth-sensor pipelines. More on the PCD format page.
How the conversion works
When you drop a file in, the bytes are handed to a parser compiled to run in your browser. The TER data is decoded into an in-memory scene graph of meshes, materials and transforms, which is what the preview is drawing. Pressing convert walks that scene graph back out through a PCD writer and hands you the resulting bytes as a download.
The whole round trip is local. The page itself is static: it is delivered once and then does its work offline. That is why the privacy claim is checkable rather than a promise.
TER to PCD: common questions
Is my TER file uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read by code running inside this browser tab and never crosses the network. You can prove it by disconnecting from the internet before you convert, the page keeps working, or by watching the Network tab in your browser's developer tools while you drop a file in.
How large a TER file can I convert?
There is no server-side limit because there is no server. The practical ceiling is your own machine's memory: a browser tab can usually handle models up to a few hundred megabytes. Very dense scans or scenes with millions of triangles will take a few seconds and a lot of RAM.
Why does my converted PCD file look untextured?
PCD stores geometry only; it has no way to record materials or texture maps. If you need the surfacing to survive, convert to GLB or glTF instead.
Does it cost anything?
No. There is no fee, no account, no watermark and no per-file limit. Since the conversion runs on your hardware rather than ours, serving this page costs about as much as serving a blog post.
Does it work on a Mac, on Windows or on a phone?
All of them. There is nothing to install: any browser with WebGL 2 will do, which covers current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on desktop, and Safari and Chrome on mobile. A phone has less memory than a laptop, so a very heavy scene may be the one thing it cannot finish.
Related conversions
Other things to do with the same file.
From TER:
Other ways to get to PCD:
Or do something else with it: