Associate extra scalar data field with mesh or pointcloud I work with scientific pointclouds and I often have extra columns of data in my .ply files. For example, I might have a column for "temperature" where there is a temperature value for each point or mesh triangle. In a 3D package called CloudCompare, it's easy to hide parts of a pointcloud or mesh based on the value of one of these "scalar fields."

Is there a similar feature in Blender? If I have a .ply with extra columns, is there any way for me to, say, color the mesh by the value of that column, or use that column as the input to a python script?
I have edited the import script so you can get extra info from the file as vertex weights with a factor as object property
ex : temperature info column will generate

vertex_group named 'temperature'
object property named 'temperature_factor'
point temperature = vertex_weight*temperature_factor

download this file (  import_ply.py  ) and replace the one in Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.73\scripts\addons\io_mesh_ply\ , restart blender after that to take effect

I have used the factor to normalize all values (0.0&lt;-&gt;1.0) because weight can't handle more than that