PLY files can be loaded into PlyEdit in a few different ways:
Right click on the PLY file and select "Edit with PlyEdit".
Drag'n'drop the PLY file onto the headus desktop icon.
Run "plyedit <file.ply>" from a command shell window.
If PlyEdit is already running, use the Mesh arrow button.
Mesh
Click on the right arrow to open up a file selection dialog. If a mesh is already being edited, loading a new PLY file will replace that mesh. If you wish to add a PLY into the mesh being edited, use the Import Align Combine tools instead.
Clicking on the Mesh button itself will open up a panel showing various details about the loaded file:
F
Number of faces.
P
Number of points.
Cntr
XYZ position in millimeters of the center of mesh.
Size
Bounding box size in millimeters of the mesh.
A
Total area of the mesh surface.
V
Total volume of the mesh if there are no holes.
Figure 2. UV Map
Map
If the PLY file being edited has UV coordinates, then the Map option will appear. Click on the right arrow to open up a file selection dialog where you can load the color map for that PLY file. Only a small number of editing tools currently support UV color, where per vertex (PV) color is fully supported. [Link to definitions of UV and PV color]
Clicking on the Map button will open up a row of additional options:
Max U
Defines the maximum U dimension of tiled color maps. Only used with CySlice color map resampling.
X
Use this button if you want to unload the UV color map.
Figure 3. Ghost Mesh
Ghost
Click on the right arrow to optionally load a ghost mesh. This mesh cant be edited, but is used as a visual reference or source for cut'n'paste operations. In theory the ghost can be any mesh, but is usually an unedited version of the mesh currently loaded. You can flick between the ghost and the mesh being edited with the <0> key.
