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Novus Examples
ply456 B

PLY — Binary Cube

The same cube as binary little-endian PLY — the compact form of the Stanford polygon format. For testing binary-PLY readers.

Loading 3D preview…

Interactive preview rendered from the equivalent glTF (cube.glb); drag to orbit. Download the file above for the PLY original.

Specifications

Format
PLY (binary little-endian)
Solid
10 mm cube
Triangles
12
Vertices
8
Byte Order
little-endian

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 — Binary Cube” is a deterministic Novus Examples fixture for Conversion testing. The same content exported across many formats and linked as a group, so you can convert one and diff against the expected twin.

Documented properties for this file: PLY (binary little-endian). 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("cube-binary.ply")
print(mesh.bounds, mesh.faces.shape)

Generated by generation/models.py. Free for any use, no attribution required — license.