Displaying STL file with colored facets
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Sleh Eddine Brika
on 6 Mar 2016
Commented: DGM
on 8 Oct 2025 at 21:46
I have an STL file of a part for 3D printing, for each facet I had calculated the surface roughness.How to display the STL file with the facets colored according to the value of its specific surface roughness? I want to get something like that

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Accepted Answer
Ahmet Cecen
on 6 Mar 2016
p = patch('faces',F,'vertices',V,'FaceColor',[0.8 0.8 1.0],'FaceLighting','gouraud');
Pass the surface roughness vector as the argument to the 'FaceColor' option.
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DGM
on 8 Oct 2025 at 21:46
Since R2018b, MATLAB has built-in STL tools. You don't need to download anything.
For legacy versions still needing third-party tools, I'd strongly recommend these tools over #22409 or the decoders in #13253. This explains why.
If you use #22409 in a modern installation, you will shadow the inbuilt tools and likely cause problems for yourself unless you rename it.
I'll note that there aren't any third-party STL decoders that I know of called exactly "readstl()", but there are at least three that are some sequence of "read" and "stl" with variations of case and underscores. The most similarly-named of the three should not be expected to actually work reliably.
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