Convert BLEND to GLB
GLB is the best thing Blender exports. Geometry, materials, textures, animation and the scene tree all travel inside one file, and unlike every other export on this site, the units and the axis conversion are handled for you.
We cannot read .blend files — only Blender can. Export a GLB using the steps below, and once you have one, the converters here will turn it into anything else you need.
Exporting a GLB from Blender
The glTF exporter ships with Blender and is the best-maintained exporter it has. Written for Blender 4.x.
Open the export dialog
File → Export → glTF 2.0 (.glb/.gltf)
The options panel on the right has three tabs at the top: Include, Data and Animation. Everything worth changing is in those.
Choose the GLB format
Format: glTF Binary (.glb)
This is the default and it is the one you want. It packs the geometry and every texture into one file. glTF Separate writes a .gltf, a .bin and a folder of images, which is three things to lose instead of one.
Decide what goes in
Include → Limit to: Selected Objects · Visible Objects
By default everything in the scene is exported, including objects hidden in the viewport. Tick Selected Objects if you only want one thing, and check that nothing hidden is going along for the ride.
Leave the axis conversion alone
Include → Transform → +Y Up (ticked)
glTF is Y-up and Blender is Z-up, and this checkbox does the conversion. It is on by default and should stay on. This is the one export from Blender where you do not have to think about axes.
Untick it only if you are feeding the file to something that expects Z-up glTF, which is unusual and almost always a mistake.
Leave the units alone too
(nothing to set)
glTF specifies metres and Blender defaults to metres, so the numbers already agree. This is the only export on this site where the scale problem does not exist — provided you did not change the scene unit scale for some other reason.
If you did set the scene to millimetres for a printing export, that will make your GLB a thousand times too small. Set it back to a Unit Scale of 1.0 before exporting glTF.
Check the material and image settings
Data → Material: Export · Images: Automatic
Automatic keeps PNGs as PNG and JPEGs as JPEG, which is right. Materials are converted from the Principled BSDF to glTF’s equivalent, which maps cleanly for the inputs glTF has and drops the ones it does not.
Include the animation, if there is any
Animation → Animation: ticked · Include → Data → Mesh → Skinning: ticked
glTF carries skeletal animation properly, which is unusual among the formats here. If your model is rigged, both of these need to be on — Skinning is what carries the weights that attach the mesh to the bones.
Export and check it
Export glTF 2.0 (the button, top right)
Drop the result into any viewer — the 3D view on any GLB converter here will do — and check the textures appear and the model is the right way up before you publish it anywhere.
What survives from a Blender material, and what does not
glTF describes a surface with a fixed, small set of values: a base colour, a metalness, a roughness, a normal map, an emission and an occlusion map. The Principled BSDF has those same inputs, which is why the conversion is usually clean — plug an image into Base Color and it arrives as the base colour texture.
What does not survive is anything built from other nodes. A material whose colour comes out of a Noise Texture through a Color Ramp, a mix of two shaders, a procedural pattern, a displacement — none of it has a glTF equivalent, because glTF describes surfaces rather than the programs that generate them.
The exporter does not warn loudly about this. It exports what it can map and silently leaves the rest, so a material that looked rich in Blender can arrive as a flat colour. If your model depends on procedural materials, bake them to image textures first: add an Image Texture node, select it, and use Render Properties, Bake with Bake Type set to Diffuse. Then plug the baked image into Base Color and export.
Subsurface scattering, anisotropy, sheen and clearcoat are similar cases. Some map through glTF extensions that the exporter supports and many viewers ignore, so the safe assumption is that what you get is base colour, metalness, roughness and normals.
Why this is the one Blender export that behaves
Every other format in this section needs you to think about units, axes or both. glTF needs neither, and it is worth understanding why, because it explains what the other formats are missing.
glTF specifies its unit. One unit is one metre, written into the standard rather than left to convention, so there is no argument to have. It also specifies Y-up, and the Blender exporter converts from Z-up automatically with the +Y Up option that is on by default.
Both of those are design decisions the format made and STL and OBJ did not. STL was written in 1987 for a single machine that worked in one unit, so nobody thought to record it. OBJ never recorded one either. Thirty years later, every conversion involving them starts with a guess.
The practical consequence is that a GLB is the most reliable thing to hand someone. It cannot arrive at the wrong scale, it cannot arrive on its side, and it cannot arrive with its textures missing, because they are inside it.
Getting from GLB to everything else
Because a GLB carries everything, it is the best starting point for any further conversion, and all of those run here. GLB to USDZ gives you a file an iPhone opens in AR with the textures intact. GLB to OBJ unpacks the textures as PNG files beside the model. GLB to STL or 3MF drops down to a printable shape.
That last one is worth a warning. A model built for the web is often a hollow shell with no thickness and holes where the camera never looked, because none of that shows on screen. It will convert to STL happily and then behave unpredictably in a slicer. The open-edge count on the converter page is the check.
If the model is rigged and animated, keep the GLB. Everything else on this site is a static shape format, and the animation will not survive the next conversion.
Where we can actually help
A GLB out of Blender converts cleanly into anything else, and all of it runs in your browser with nothing uploaded.
Questions
- Should I export GLB or glTF?
- GLB. It is one file with the textures inside it. glTF Separate gives you a .gltf, a .bin and an image folder that all have to stay together, which is three ways for something to go missing.
- My material looks completely different after export.
- It was probably built from procedural nodes, which glTF cannot describe. Bake the material to an image texture first — Render Properties, Bake, with an Image Texture node selected — then plug the baked image into Base Color.
- Does animation survive?
- Yes, which is unusual. Tick Animation in the Animation tab and Skinning under Data, Mesh. glTF carries skeletal animation properly, and it is the only format on this site that does.
- Do I need to change the scale?
- No. Both Blender and glTF use metres, so they already agree. The exception is if you had previously set the scene unit scale to 0.001 for a printing export — set it back to 1.0 first.
- My model is upside down or on its side.
- Check that +Y Up is ticked in the Include, Transform section. It is on by default and it does the Z-up to Y-up conversion glTF needs.
Where to go next
Related guides
Tools that do part of this here
About these formats
Checked against current software versions on 2026-09-11