Point Cloud — Fibonacci Sphere (PLY)
A 1,200-point coloured point cloud arranged on a sphere via a Fibonacci lattice — a vertex-only PLY (no faces), the format scanners and LiDAR tools produce. Paired with a GLB (POINTS) twin, for testing point-cloud loaders.
Interactive preview rendered from the equivalent glTF (sphere-points.glb); drag to orbit. Download the file above for the PLY original.
Specifications
- Format
- PLY (ASCII, points only)
- Points
- 1200
- Coloured
- true
- Shape
- unit sphere (Fibonacci lattice)
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
“Point Cloud — Fibonacci Sphere (PLY)” 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 (ASCII, points only). 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("sphere-points.ply")
print(mesh.bounds, mesh.faces.shape)Related files
- 3mf3MF — Manufacturing CubeA 10 mm cube as 3MF — the modern OPC-packaged manufacturing format (a ZIP of model XML plus relationships). For testing 3MF readers and slicers.
- binBIN — glTF Buffer CompanionBinary buffer companion for the textured mini glTF (positions, UVs, indices).
- binBIN — glTF External Buffer PayloadThe binary payload the external-buffer glTF in this group points at: tightly-packed positions, normals and indices with 4-byte alignment padding. Not viewable on its own — its bufferViews live in the JSON.
- jsonConvert v2 3DS Semantic Geometry ReferenceJSON semantic reference for the 3DS tetrahedron, publishing vertex order, face indices, bounds, and the closed-mesh contract. Stable P8 artifact p8-convert-model-3ds-reference.
- jsonConvert v2 AMF Semantic Geometry ReferenceJSON semantic reference for the AMF tetrahedron, publishing vertex order, face indices, bounds, and the closed-mesh contract. Stable P8 artifact p8-convert-model-amf-reference.
- jsonConvert v2 DRC Semantic Geometry ReferenceJSON semantic reference for the DRC tetrahedron, publishing vertex order, face indices, bounds, and the closed-mesh contract. Stable P8 artifact p8-convert-model-drc-reference.
Generated by generation/models_realistic.py. Free for any use, no attribution required — license.