View PLY Meshes and Vertex Colors
Inspect polygon geometry, vertex colors and normals from an ASCII or binary PLY locally.
Supported preview
ASCII and binary little-endian PLY 1.0 meshes; RGB uchar colors and vertex normals.
Distinguish stored faces from displayed triangles
PLY polygons can become several triangles in the viewport, so the source face count and displayed triangle count can differ. Supported vertex normals and uchar RGB colors are shown when present. The encoding label identifies ASCII or binary little-endian input; coordinate bounds do not imply physical units.
How to use this viewer
- Select a PLY mesh.
- Inspect the triangulated preview, bounds, encoding and color availability.
Limitations to check
- Mesh only: point clouds, big-endian files and custom elements are rejected.
- Simple planar polygons up to 128 vertices are triangulated. Units remain unspecified.
File and processing limits
- PLY input up to 20 MiB and a 64 KiB header.
- 300,000 vertices, 200,000 faces, 128 corners per polygon and 250,000 output triangles.
- 30 seconds per mesh job. Browser memory and device speed can impose lower practical limits.
Processing happens in this browser; your file and filename are not uploaded. Cancel, reset or replace the file to stop its worker. Downloads are generated locally.
Questions about this workflow
Why does a valid PLY scan fail to open?
PLY also supports point-only data and custom element layouts. This mesh viewer requires polygon faces and its documented property subset. It does not reconstruct scan surfaces or display standalone points.