Format Guide
Stanford's polygon format — per-vertex color, normals, and custom attributes for point clouds and scan data.
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| Extension | .ply |
|---|---|
| Full name | Polygon File Format / Stanford Triangle Format |
| Geometry type | Polygon mesh with custom per-vertex/per-face attributes |
| Variants | ASCII, Binary (little-endian), Binary (big-endian) |
| Open standard | Yes |
| Supports color | Yes — per-vertex RGB/RGBA |
| Supports normals | Yes — per-vertex |
| Supports arbitrary properties | Yes — self-describing header |
PLY (Polygon File Format, also known as Stanford Triangle Format) was developed at Stanford University in the 1990s for storing 3D scan data from the Digital Michelangelo Project. PLY uses a flexible, self-describing header that defines which per-vertex and per-face properties the file contains — for example: position, RGB color, normal vector, confidence, intensity. This makes PLY ideal for 3D scanner output, photogrammetry point clouds, and research datasets where geometry comes with rich per-point metadata. PLY exists in ASCII and binary (little-endian or big-endian) variants.
Lidar scanners, structured light scanners, and depth cameras (Intel RealSense, Microsoft Azure Kinect) output PLY files with per-point color and normal data.
Photogrammetry software (Agisoft Metashape, COLMAP, OpenMVS) exports point clouds and dense meshes as PLY files for further processing in MeshLab or CloudCompare.
The Stanford 3D Scanning Repository (including the famous Stanford Bunny and Dragon models) distributes datasets in PLY format, making it the de facto standard for geometry processing research.
MeshLab, CloudCompare, Blender, Open3D, PCL (Point Cloud Library), Assimp, 3D Slicer, and 3D CAD Converter.
Commonly converted to STL for 3D printing, to OBJ for rendering, or to glTF/GLB for web visualization. Mesh repair is often needed before printing PLY scan data.