Formatguide
Stanford 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) was developed at Stanford University in the 1990s for 3D scan data. PLY uses a flexible self-describing header defining per-vertex and per-face properties — position, RGB color, normal vector, confidence, intensity. This makes PLY ideal for 3D scanner output and photogrammetry point clouds.
Lidar scanners, structured light scanners and depth cameras (Intel RealSense, 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.
The Stanford 3D Scanning Repository (Stanford Bunny, Dragon) distributes datasets in PLY format.
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.