read.fs.surface.vtk: Read VTK legacy format mesh as surface.

In freesurferformats: Read and Write 'FreeSurfer' Neuroimaging File Formats

Read VTK legacy format mesh as surface.

Description

Reads meshes from files in the VTK legacy format. Both the ASCII and the binary encoding are supported, as are the cell array layouts written by VTK 4.2 and older and by VTK 5.1 and newer, see the notes. See https://vtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/file-formats.pdf for the format specification. Note that this function does not read arbitrary VTK datasets, it supports only the geometry of POLYDATA datasets (meshes and point clouds); attribute data such as normals, texture coordinates or scalars is ignored. Only triangular meshes are supported, files containing other polygons are rejected with an error.

Usage

read.fs.surface.vtk(filepath)

Arguments

filepath

string. Full path to the input surface file in VTK format.

Value

named list. The list has the following named entries: "vertices": nx3 double matrix, where n is the number of vertices. Each row contains the x,y,z coordinates of a single vertex. "faces": nx3 integer matrix. Each row contains the vertex indices of the 3 vertices defining the face. WARNING: The indices are returned starting with index 1 (as used in GNU R). Keep in mind that you need to adjust the index (by substracting 1) to compare with data from other software.

Note

This is by far not a complete VTK format reader. Files that store streamlines instead of a mesh (i.e., that contain a LINES section) are read with read.fs.tracts.vtk.

See Also

Other mesh functions: faces.quad.to.tris(), read.fs.surface(), read.fs.surface.asc(), read.fs.surface.bvsrf(), read.fs.surface.geo(), read.fs.surface.gii(), read.fs.surface.ico(), read.fs.surface.obj(), read.fs.surface.off(), read.fs.surface.ply(), read.mesh.brainvoyager(), read_nisurface(), read_nisurfacefile(), write.fs.surface(), write.fs.surface.asc(), write.fs.surface.byu(), write.fs.surface.gii(), write.fs.surface.mz3(), write.fs.surface.vtk()

Examples

surface_file <- system.file("extdata", "cube.vtk", package = "freesurferformats", mustWork = TRUE)
mesh <- read.fs.surface.vtk(surface_file)
cat(sprintf("Read a mesh with %d vertices and %d faces.\n", nrow(mesh$vertices), nrow(mesh$faces)))

freesurferformats documentation built on Sept. 25, 2026, 1:07 a.m.