mdsumner is correct. For those who might care, here are the basic steps.
1) break each element (e.g., "engine") into a separate array.
2) build a matrix of x,y,z vertices compatible with coords.3d
(see rgl
documentation) by
reading the referenced vertex numbers in each 'engine' row and retrieving the coordinate sets from the "v" set of vertex coordinates.
3) plot it.
For an element with 896 rows (i.e. 896 triangles making up the item),
trieng<-matrix(nrow=896*3,ncol=3)
for (j in 1:896) {
trieng[(1+3*(j-1)):(3+3*(j-1)),1:3] <- v737[engine737[j,1:3],1:3]
}
Where I've removed the first column (containing "v", "f") from my data matrices.