# Triangle meshes

Triangle meshes are general polyhedral objects made of vertices connected by triangular faces. Typically, they are imported as extra objects into the scene using the File ‣ Load File function of OVITO. You can use triangle meshes, for example, to visualize additional geometry next to your simulation data. OVITO supports several common geometry file formats such as STL, OBJ and VTK. See this page for a complete list.

Either the faces or vertices of a triangle mesh may be associated with color information - if such information is present in the imported geometry file. Otherwise, the uniform coloring of the mesh is controlled by the user within OVITO. See also the visual element for triangle meshes for more information.

Note that triangle meshes are also used in OVITO to give particles a free-form shape.

See also

`ovito.data.TriangleMesh` (Python API)