Michelangelo's David

Size of raw scans:approx 1.1 billion points
Reconstruction:VRIP at 1mm resolution
Size of reconstruction:28,184,526 vertices, 56,230,343 triangles
Color:none
Version:1 (September 1, 2000)
Status:Some scans misaligned by up to several millimeters; some holes, especially near hands, hair, and scrotum.
Available as:
  • PLY file (david_1mm_01sep00.ply.gz, 540 MB)

    • Also available at 2mm resolution, decimated and holefilled
    Size of reconstruction:4,128,614 vertices, 8,254,150 triangles
    Color:none
    Version:2 (September 23, 2000)
    (Version 1 turns out to be a corrupted model. It should no longer be used.)
    Available as:
  • PLY file (david_2mm_23sep00.ply.gz, 82.4 MB)
  • QS file (david_2mm_23sep00.qs.gz, 20.7 MB)

    • Latest 2mm Version
    Size of reconstruction:4,142,965 vertices, 8,233,795 triangles
    Color:none
    Version:3 (August 28, 2002)
    Available as:
  • PLY file (david_2mm_29aug02.ply.gz, 126 MB)
  • QS file (david_2mm_29aug02.qs.gz, 33.9 MB)

    • Modified 2mm Version
    Size of reconstruction:3,614,098 vertices
    Color:none
    Version:3.1 (March 19, 2003)
    Note: This version is a modified version of the August 28 vrip, with a few vrip and holefilling artifacts removed in Paraform.
    Available as:
  • PLY file (david_2mm_19mar03.ply.gz, 66.7 MB)
  • QS file (david_2mm_19mar03.qs.gz, 18.4 MB)

    • Non-rigidly aligned, 0.25mm resolution version 1 (original)
    Reconstruction:VRIP at 0.25mm resolution
    Size of reconstruction:approx. 940 million triangles
    Color:none
    Version:1 (July 17, 2009)
    Note: This model was aligned by Benedict Brown and Szymon Rusinkiewicz using the non-rigid alignment method described in their 2007 SIGGRAPH paper. This version is superseded by version 2, below.
    Available as:
  • 15 gzipped tar archive files (david_qtrmm_jul2009_{1,2,3,...,15}.tar.gz, total 8.8 GB). Each tar file contains several PLY files (150 total) representing a section of the model; the adjacent PLY meshes overlap each other with several rows of coincident vertices and faces.

    • Non-rigidly aligned, 0.25mm resolution version 2 (improved)
    Reconstruction:VRIP at 0.25mm resolution
    Size of reconstruction:approx. 930 million triangles
    Color:none
    Version:2 (July 22, 2011)
    Note: This model was aligned by Benedict Brown using the non-rigid alignment method described in this 2007 SIGGRAPH paper. It is an improvement over version 1 (above), although there are still serious alignment problems on the right arm and right thigh.
    Available as:
  • 15 gzipped tar archive files (david_qtrmm_jul2011_{1,2,3,...,15}.tar.gz, total 9.0 GB). Each tar file contains several PLY files (150 total) representing a section of the model; the adjacent PLY meshes overlap each other with several rows of coincident vertices and faces.


    • Click here for more renderings of this dataset (ignore the color in these renderings).

    We also have simplified versions of the 56M-triangle model.
    The simplification was performed by Paolo Cignoni (CNR, Pisa, Italy).
    Click here for a paper describing their algorithm:

  • PLY file (vcg_david_1M.ply.gz, 1 million triangles, 10 MB)
  • PLY file (vcg_david_500k.ply.gz, 500,000 triangles, 5 MB)
    The latter model is also available in several standard 3D formats:
  • Inventor format (vcg_david_500k.iv, 11 MB)
  • Wavefront format (vcg_david_500k.obj, 18 MB)