Convert TER to RAW

Free, in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Drop your .ter file in and take the .raw away.

Drop your TER file here

.ter in, .raw out

Choose files

Nothing is uploaded No account, no email No file size limit

How to convert TER to RAW

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 03

    Save the .raw file

    Press convert. The Raw Triangles 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 an RAW file.

DataTERRAWSurvives
GeometryYesYesYes
Materials & colourNoNon/a
Texture mapsNoNon/a
Animation & rigsNoNon/a
Scene hierarchyNoNon/a

This is a comparatively lossless pairing: 1 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 RAW file.

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 Raw Triangles

The RAW format is a text file in which every line is a complete triangle: nine floating-point numbers, optionally preceded by a group name. There is no index, no vertex sharing, no header and no specification beyond that. It exists because it takes about ten lines of code to write from any language, which makes it the format of choice for quick scripted exports and for teaching mesh handling.

Commonly seen in: scripted exports, POV-Ray tooling, teaching material. More on the RAW 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 RAW 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 RAW: 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 RAW file look untextured?

RAW 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 RAW:

Or do something else with it: