PLY

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

PLY is known for its simplicity and flexibility, but its functional boundaries stem from this: 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, making them the preferred choice when processing scanned data.