PLY Importer

The PLY importer is built on top of the excellent RPly library written by Diego Nehab (www.cs.princeton.edu/~diego/professional/rply).

The PLY importer supports triangular and quadrilateral faces with vertex coordinates, normals, colors and texture coordinates. Both, ASCII and binary file formats are supported.

When creating PLY files for use with 3Dskope you can use the following attribute names:

Element: vertex

  x      float    x coordinate

  y      float    y coordinate

  z      float    z coordinate

  nx     float    x component of normal

  ny     float    y component of normal

  nz     float    z component of normal

  s      float    1st texture coordinate

  t      float    2nd texture coordinate

       or

  u      float    1st texture coordinate

  v      float    2nd texture coordinate

   

  r      uchar    red part of color

  g      uchar    green part of color

  b      uchar    blue part of color

  a      uchar    amount of opacity

       or

  red    uchar    red part of color

  green  uchar    green part of color

  blue   uchar    blue part of color

  alpha  uchar    amount of opacity

       or

  diffuse_red    uchar

  diffuse_green  uchar

  diffuse_blue   uchar

Element: face

  vertex_indices  list of int indices to

       or         vertices

  vertex_index

Element: edge

  vertex1  int    index to 1st vertex

  vertex2  int    index to 2nd vertex

All other attributes are ignored by 3Dskope.

If you find issues with the PLY importer or if you want 3Dskope to support additional PLY attributes you may E-mail us a copy of your PLY file for investigation. Please ZIP the file and also include a screenshot to show how the file should be displayed properly.

Cross-section of a turbine blade from the Large Geometric Models Archive at Georgia Institute of Technology on an iPad 2.

84 MB, 1,765,388 triangles, PLY file format.