Import from PLY

Export to PLY gets your clouds out of ComfyUI; Import from PLY is how they come back. Drop a .ply file into ComfyUI's input folder and this node loads it as a Points3D cloud, letting you transform it, crop it, render it, or round-trip it - the natural pairing is Export → tweak in MeshLab/CloudCompare → Import → continue the pipeline.

PLY is the lingua franca of point clouds, so this is the pack's bridge to the wider 3D world. Anything that writes PLY - MeshLab, CloudCompare, Open3D, a photogrammetry pipeline, even your own script - can feed back in here. Which means it's also the node that turns this from "a self-contained toy" into something you can push real geometry through.

How it works

The node lists every .ply file in ComfyUI's input/ directory and gives you a dropdown to pick one (there's also an upload button, so you can push a file from the UI without touching the filesystem). On run, it reads the PLY header to detect the format, then parses either ASCII or binary_little_endian data, pulling x, y, z and RGB. One thing it does on the way in: it translates the cloud so the minimum X and Y land at zero - a normalization step that keeps downstream rendering sensible.

The README labels this one "(Sperimental)" - yes, that's the author's spelling - so treat it as the most likely to have rough edges in the pack.

The inputs that matter

Just one: points, a dropdown of the .ply files in your input folder. Upload through the UI or drop the file in ComfyUI/input/, then select it.

Output: Points3D - the loaded cloud, same N×6 (x, y, z, r, g, b) format as the pack's other nodes produce, so it plugs straight into Transform Points, Cube Limit, or the renderers.

Install

Pack-standard: Manager → "ComfyUI_depthMapOperation", or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/chri002/ComfyUI_depthMapOperation

Restart. No models, no keys; deps (torch, numpy, opencv-python, scipy, pandas) are stock.

Where people get burned

The format pickiness is the main one. The reader supports ASCII and binary little-endian PLY only - a big-endian binary or a binary-big-endian file raises a "PLY format file error" and you're told to use ascii or binary_little_endian. That's also exactly why Export to PLY offers those two options; match them on round-trips. Second, only files ending in .ply appear in the dropdown, and the import expects color properties (x/y/z plus red/green/blue) - a PLY with only XYZ will fail the property lookup. Export from this pack always includes RGB, so files you made yourself are fine. And as ever: single frame, no batches.