PLY viewer

Drop a Stanford .ply — binary or ASCII — and inspect the scan under studio light. Vertex-colored point clouds and meshes both render.

Questions people ask

What is a PLY file used for?

PLY is the Stanford polygon format, common in 3D scanning, point clouds and research pipelines. It stores meshes or raw vertex clouds with arbitrary per-vertex properties — most often color.

Does this viewer render vertex colors?

Yes — vertex-colored meshes and point clouds both render under studio lighting, in binary and ASCII variants. The stats bar reports mesh and triangle totals so you can sanity-check a scan on load.

Can I turn a scan into a printable file?

Yes: convert PLY to STL locally to get pure triangles for a slicer. Color is dropped in that conversion because STL cannot store it — keep the PLY as your colored master copy.