A TrussC addon for reading and writing PLY (Stanford Polygon File Format) files as a tc::Mesh — meshes and point clouds, ASCII and binary (little/big endian).

#include <tcxPly.h>
using namespace tcx;

// Read (one-liner)
Mesh mesh = loadPly("bunny.ply");
mesh.draw();

// Write
savePly("out.ply", mesh);                          // ASCII
savePly("out.ply", mesh, PlyFormat::BinaryLittleEndian);

• Reading: ascii / binary_little_endian / binary_big_endian, auto-detected from the header
• Mesh ↔ point cloud: a face element yields an indexed mesh; without one you get a PrimitiveMode::Points cloud
• Standard attributes → Mesh: position x,y,z / normals nx,ny,nz / vertex color red,green,blue[,alpha] (uchar 0-255 mapped to 0-1) / texcoords s,t, u,v, texture_u,texture_v
• Polygon triangulation: faces with more than 3 vertices are fan-triangulated
• Non-standard property retention: per-vertex / per-face scalars like quality or intensity are kept and fetchable by name
• Metadata retention: format / comment / obj_info are preserved and restored across load → save
• Writing: ascii and binary_little_endian (selectable via PlyFormat)

The free functions loadPly / savePly are for the "I just want a Mesh" case. Use the Ply class when you want metadata or extra property columns.

Ply ply;
ply.load("scan.ply");

Mesh mesh      = ply.toMesh();
BoundingBox bb = ply.getBoundingBox();   // bb.center(), bb.size()

// Properties are fetched "typed": if the template type does not match the
// PLY type, you get an empty vector (no conversion). Standard and custom
// properties are accessed the same way.
auto crv = ply.getVertexProperty<float>("curvature");    // a float property
auto red = ply.getVertexProperty<uint8_t>("red");        // a uchar property
// List the properties a file holds (name + type)
for (auto& p : ply.getVertexProperties())
    logNotice() << p.name << " : " << plyTypeName(p.type);

for (auto& c : ply.getComments())  logNotice() << c;
for (auto& o : ply.getObjInfo())   logNotice() << o;

// Write from a Mesh (metadata can be attached too)
Ply out;
out.setMesh(mesh);
out.addComment("exported from MyApp");
out.save("out.ply", PlyFormat::BinaryLittleEndian);

Main methods:

cd addons/tcxPly/example-load     # display a colored point cloud, drag & drop .ply
trusscli update
trusscli run

cd ../example-save                # generate a Mesh → save → reload → display
trusscli update
trusscli run

On startup example-load shows fragment.ply — the RGB-colored point cloud from the Redwood "Living Room" indoor scan (public domain). The bundled copy is a derivative produced by tcxPly's own save(): downsampled to 1/4 and flipped upright, keeping every property (including curvature and the camera element). Drag and drop any .ply onto the window to load it (with color recovery from a Gaussian Splat's f_dc_* terms). When a mesh is dropped, [SPACE] cycles face → wireframe → dots. See LICENSES.md for the bundled-data licenses.

The example-*/ directories are meant to be run and read. The tests/ directory is the headless CI test harness — you can ignore it.

• Writing supports only ASCII and little-endian binary (big-endian is read-only)
• toMesh() only interprets the vertex / face elements. Custom elements (edge, camera, ...) are reachable as raw data via getElements() but are not reflected into the Mesh
• Values are stored internally as double, so 64-bit integer properties (int64 / uint64) are not supported

MIT — see LICENSES.md.