Universal Scene Description .usd
Pixar’s scene description. The backbone of modern film pipelines.
What a .usd file holds
USD is Pixar’s system for describing, composing and overriding 3D scenes, open-sourced in 2016 and now the spine of most large animation and VFX pipelines. Its defining idea is composition: a scene is assembled from layered references that each override the last, so modelling, lighting and animation departments can work on one asset without stepping on each other. The .usd extension may hold either the text or the binary encoding.
Commonly seen in: Pixar, Houdini, Maya, NVIDIA Omniverse, Blender, Unreal Engine.
| Data | Stored in USD |
|---|---|
| Geometry | Yes |
| Materials and colour | Yes |
| Texture maps | Yes |
| Animation and rigs | Yes |
| Scene hierarchy | Yes |
| Read here | Yes |
| Written here | No |
Tested against a real file
The last sweep loaded MotionCaptureROM.usd from Assimp test models, renamed from .usdc through the viewer on this site: 2,000 triangles across 24 meshes and 24 materials, in 2.0 seconds. Every format's result is on the test results page, run 2026-09-08.
Convert USD to another format
Every pairing has a page saying what survives the trip.
Other things to do with a .usd file
Questions about USD
How do I open a .usd file?
Drop it into the viewer on this site and it opens in the browser, with the scene tree, the materials and the mesh statistics. Nothing is uploaded. If you want it in another program instead, convert it to GLB, which almost everything reads.
Is USD a good format to archive in?
USD carries geometry, materials, textures and animation, so an archive copy keeps nearly everything. The usual caveat applies: a format is only as future-proof as the readers that exist for it, and .usd is well served.
Does converting USD lose quality?
Geometry is copied vertex for vertex, so the shape does not degrade. What gets lost is whatever the target format has no field for: convert to STL and the materials go, convert to OBJ and the animation goes. The comparison table on each converter page says exactly which.
Formats that hold the same things
Or go back to the full format reference.