PLY — Duplicate Vertices, Split Seam
The duplicated-corner cube as ASCII PLY — the format scanners and photogrammetry tools emit, and the one where unwelded duplicates are most common because each captured point arrives independently.
Interactive preview rendered from the equivalent glTF (duplicate-vertices.glb); drag to orbit. Download the file above for the PLY original.
Specifications
- Format
- PLY (ASCII)
- Vertices
- 16
- Unique Positions
- 8
- Duplicate Vertices
- 8
- Faces
- 12
- Note
- same topology as the OBJ twin
Testing contract
Expected to recover- Scenario
- Import into a point-cloud or mesh tool and read back the vertex count before any cleanup.
- Expected result
- 16 vertices for 8 distinct positions; a duplicate-removal pass at tolerance 0.0 must halve the count without moving any surface.
What is a .ply file?
PLY (.ply, Polygon/Stanford Triangle Format) is a flexible 3D format storing a list of vertices and faces with arbitrary per-element properties (position, colour, normals, confidence), in ASCII or binary. It is standard for scanned meshes and point clouds.
How to use this file
Use an example .ply file to test mesh/point-cloud parsers (Open3D, MeshLab), per-vertex colour handling, and PLY conversion.
How to use this file for testing
“PLY — Duplicate Vertices, Split Seam” is a deterministic Novus Examples fixture for Mesh repair testing, Mesh processing QA. A watertight mesh paired with a deliberately broken twin (holes, missing faces, open ends) — the input and intended result for a mesh-repair / hole-filling tool.
Documented properties for this file: PLY (ASCII). Compare results against paired or grouped companions on this page when present (clean↔damaged, searchable↔scanned, or format twins) so scores stay reproducible across runs.
Download the file once, keep the path stable in CI or local scripts, and treat the spec table as the contract: dimensions, seeds, field lists, and roles are intentional. Corrupt or invalid samples are labelled as such — expect parsers to fail loudly rather than silently accept them.
3D and CAD fixtures carry one small, documented solid or scene. Convert and inspect against the known geometry, units, and structure; format twins let you diff interchange fidelity, and the 3D viewer previews the actual mesh.
Code examples
import trimesh # pip install trimesh
mesh = trimesh.load("duplicate-vertices.ply")
print(mesh.bounds, mesh.faces.shape)Related files
- glbGLB — Clean Reference CubeThe clean reference cube as a GLB, so the same baseline is available to glTF tooling and to the site's 3D preview. Identical topology to the OBJ twin in this group.
- glbGLB — Inverted Normals / Mixed WindingThe mixed-winding cube as a GLB with a default single-sided material, so the reversed faces are culled and you can see straight through the model. Turning on doubleSided hides the defect without fixing it, which is the trap this fixture is for.
- glbGLB — Non-manifold Edge (three faces on one edge)The finned cube as a GLB. It renders without complaint in any viewer — rasterisation never asks about adjacency — so this is the fixture that separates tools which actually analyse topology from tools which merely draw triangles.
- glbGLB — Zero-area TrianglesThe same four degenerate triangles inside a structurally valid GLB. The file passes every glTF schema check — nothing in the format forbids a zero-area face — so this is the fixture for geometry validation as opposed to document validation.
- objOBJ — Clean Reference CubeA welded, manifold, consistently-wound unit cube: 8 vertices, 12 triangles, 18 edges each shared by exactly two faces, and a signed volume of exactly 1.0. This is the answer key — each defect fixture in the degenerate/ subcategory is this mesh with exactly one thing wrong.
- objOBJ — Inverted Normals / Mixed WindingThe reference cube with three of its six cube faces (six of its twelve triangles) wound clockwise instead of counter-clockwise, and `vn` records that follow the reversed winding into the solid. The classic symptom is a model that looks half-invisible with backface culling on and half-black with it off.
Generated by generation/models_p7.py. Free for any use, no attribution required — license.