.PLY Mesh Face Color Support

I was wondering if open3D supports .ply meshes with rgb face color attributes? From what I could gather from some quick experimentation, only vertex colors are supported, which isn’t ideal in my application. I couldn’t find anything concrete in the documentation either, so any help is welcome!

I am trying to segment planes in a reconstructed environment and display them as a single color. The code I currently have outputs a PLY with face colors set so that each region has a unique color. I am able to view these files without any issue in meshlab. But unfortunately, visualizing the mesh using open3d results in a completely grey mesh… I tried working around this using vertex color, which does show up, but results in the color bleeding into adjacent faces.

Are there any alternatives or have I missed anything?

For reference, here’s what I’m talking about:


On the left, is the mesh imported and viewed in Meshlab, with only face color attributes. In the middle is the same mesh imported and visualized with open3D. On the right is my attempted work around in open3d with only vertex colors, but its definitely not ideal.

Thanks in advance!

You are right, face color is not yet supported for now… But Open3D is trying to introduce significant changes in the internal structure to support physically based rendering, and I will mention your request in our meetings.

Thanks for your interest!