PLY

PLY (Polygon File Format) was designed by the Stanford University Graphics Laboratory and is widely used for 3D scanner output and point cloud/mesh processing. It supports attributes such as vertex coordinates, colors, normals, and texture coordinates, and provides both ASCII and binary encoding.

PLY is known for its simplicity and flexibility, but this also defines its functional boundaries: it lacks standard animation and material systems, making it more suitable for static geometry and scanned data. Binary PLY files are smaller and load faster, and are preferred when processing scanned data.