What is a .PLY file?
PLY (Polygon File Format) stores 3D meshes and point clouds, often with per-vertex colour. Common in 3D scanning.
- Did you know
- PLY was created at Stanford in the 1990s and is famous for storing the Stanford Bunny scan.
- PLY was devised at Stanford in the mid-1990s by Greg Turk to store the scanned 3D models the university’s graphics lab was producing.
- A PLY file can be saved as human-readable ASCII or as compact little-endian or big-endian binary, with the choice declared on the header’s format line.
- PLY’s flexible element-and-property header lets it carry extra per-vertex data such as colour, surface normals, transparency and texture coordinates.
- Beyond solid meshes, PLY is widely used to hold raw point clouds from laser scanners and photogrammetry, where there are vertices but no faces.
- What Analyser shows you
- View STL, OBJ, PLY, OFF, STEP, IGES, BREP, 3MF, AMF and glTF/GLB models in an interactive WebGL viewer with orbit, orthographic or perspective projection, a wireframe topology overlay, an orientation cube, triangle count, bounding box, surface area and volume. glTF 2.0 and binary GLB scenes are parsed natively - the node graph is flattened, mesh geometry shown, and the authoring tool, version and mesh/material/animation counts read. STEP/IGES/BREP are tessellated with OpenCASCADE and STEP shows its originating CAD system, version and AP203/214/242 protocol; 3MF and AMF let you inspect each model and assembly on the build plate individually, and any pictures a 3MF package carries - its own thumbnail, the build-plate renders slicers such as Bambu Studio and OrcaSlicer write, and texture maps - are extracted and shown with it. Wavefront material libraries (MTL) are broken out into each material with its colours, shininess, opacity and the texture files it references.
- Open a .PLY file
- Drag a .PLY file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It opens entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.