C# code snippet to write a Stanford Polygon binary file

The Stanford Polygon file format (PLY) is a standard three-dimensional file format typically used in 3-D software such as Blender, 3D Studio Max and many others. I looked for some C# source code to write 3-D data into a file in binary PLY format but could only find C++ examples. So I came up with my own code snippet which just writes out simple 3-D vertices without additional properties, as shown below.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using System.IO;

SomeFunction()

{

BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(new FileStream("myBinaryFile.ply", FileMode.Create), Encoding.ASCII);

//Write the headers for 3 vertices

writer.Write(str2byteArray("ply\n"));

writer.Write(str2byteArray("format binary_little_endian 1.0\n"));

writer.Write(str2byteArray("element vertex 3\n"));

writer.Write(str2byteArray("property float x\n"));

writer.Write(str2byteArray("property float y\n"));

writer.Write(str2byteArray("property float z\n"));

writer.Write(str2byteArray("end_header\n"));

//Write the 1st vertex

writer.Write(float2byteArray((float)1000.0));

writer.Write(float2byteArray((float)1230.3));

writer.Write(float2byteArray((float)2390.1));

//... write the remaining 2 vertices here

//Close the binary writer

writer.Close();

}

private byte[] float2byteArray(float value)

{

return BitConverter.GetBytes(value);

}

private byte[] str2byteArray(string theString)

{

return System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(theString);

}

This example is meant only for little endian machines.