Meshes

Formats that store a surface as a list of points in space and the polygons that join them, often with normals, colours or texture coordinates. They are simple, widely supported and easy to pass between programs.

Formats

.OBJ

Wavefront OBJ

A plain text mesh of vertices, normals and faces, read by almost every 3D program.

.PLY

Polygon File Format

Stanford’s mesh and point cloud format, with a header that declares every property.

.STL

Stereolithography

A surface of triangles and nothing else, the standard input for 3D printing.