PLY Format
PLY or Stanford Polygon format defines a flexible and systematic scheme for storing graphical objects that are described as a collection of polygons. A ".PLY" file is composed of 3 main mandatory sections plus optional ones thereafter. The first section is the header, then comes the data in either ASCII or binary.
Header
The header is a collection of carriage-return terminated line with at least the following:
- The first line must contain the lowercase directive: ply
This indicates that the file is intended to be read as a PLY file. - The next line must be: format followed by either ascii, binary_little_endian or binary_big_endian and a version number.
This describes which format was used to store the information after the header. - The next lines start off with a directive followed be attributes, these can be:
- comment followed by whatever text the author decided to use. This is ignored for reading
- element followed by a label and a number. The labels parsed are vertex and face, usually vertices are described before faces. The number corresponds to the number of entries in this file.
- property followed by a type and a label. An exception is the list type which is followed by 2 types, the first describing its length type and the second being the type stored in the list, and a label. These properties are tied to the element declared above them:
Types can be:char or int8 8-bit integer 1 uchar or uint8 8-bit unsigned integer 1 short or int16 16-bit integer 2 ushort or uint16 16-bit unsigned integer 2 int or int32 32-bit integer 4 uint or uint32 32-bit unsigned integer 4 float or float32 single-precision floating number 4 double or float64 double-precision floating number 8
- The last line must contain the lowercase directive: endheader
ASCII data
Both vertex and face blocks are as they were described in the header with each property separated by a blank space and each line representing an element. The following example illustrates this:
ply format ascii 1.0 element vertex 9 property float64 x property float64 y property float64 z element face 8 property list uint32 int32 vertex_indices end_header -1.38639 1 1 -1.38639 1 1.11022e-016 -1.38639 2 1 -1.38639 2 1.66533e-016 -1.38639 -8.4892e-017 5.55112e-017 -1.38639 -1.46124e-016 1 -1.38639 -2.07357e-016 2 -1.38639 1 2 -1.38639 2 2 3 0 3 2 3 0 1 3 3 5 1 0 3 5 4 1 3 6 5 0 3 6 0 7 3 7 0 2 3 7 2 8
Binary data
The data blocks follow their description from the header so if the header is presented as such:
ply format binary_little_endian 1.0 element vertex 9 property float64 x property float64 y property float64 z element face 8 property list uint32 int32 vertex_indices end_header