You can display a full-color mesh in two ways:
- mesh+texture: the mesh contains texture coordinates for each point and the texture image is stored in a separate file. Slicer can read texture coordinates from meshes stored in VTK, VTP, OBJ, and maybe PLY format. You can load the texture image from any file (JPG, PNG, …) and apply it to the mesh using Texture model module. Texture module can also write the color to point data, so you can save a vertex-colored mesh in a VTK, VTP, or PLY file.
- vertex-colored mesh: the mesh contains RGB value for each point. Slicer can read such meshes from VTK, VTP, and PLY files. Colored PLY file reading was just added a few days ago, so you need the very latest Slicer Preview Release.