PLY (Polygon File Format or Stanford Triangle Format) is  a file format for 3-D computer-aided design and modeling.

This format has both text-based and binary variants.

It represents geometric data as a collection of lines and polygons.

The plottools[importplot] and plottools[exportplot] commands can be used for data exchange between this format and Maple 3-D plots. Both the text-based and binary variants are fully supported.

The general-purpose commands Import and Export also support this format.

With both the plottools[exportplot] and Export commands, you can specify whether the text-based or binary format is desired using the encoding option.

$\mathrm{Import}\left(''example/gear.ply''\,\mathrm{base}=\mathrm{datadir}\right)$