A 3D scan, opened with its colours.
PLY files hold 3D scans: meshes or clouds of points, often coloured. Open one in your browser with nothing uploaded, turn it round and measure it.
By Suraj Kumar3 min read
PLY was made at Stanford for 3D scans, and scanning apps still write it. A PLY may hold a mesh of triangles or only a cloud of points, each with its own colour. KeepSimp's PLY viewer opens both kinds in your browser.
Open it, mesh or points.
Open the PLY viewer and drop the file on it. Text and binary PLY files open. A PLY with faces is drawn as a surface; one with only points is drawn as a cloud, each point in its own colour.
Its size.
PLY files have no unit. Scanning apps usually write metres, which is how the viewer reads them; choose another unit if the size looks wrong.
A cloud of points has no surface, so no area or volume is given for it; a mesh is measured like any other model.
Look closer.
Turn it round, cut through it, and press Measure, then two points, for the distance between them.
Further reading
Topics: open ply file · ply viewer · point cloud viewer · 3d scan viewer · ply file viewer online · view ply file
A little less theory. A little more doing.
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