Format Guide
Pixar's Universal Scene Description — the standard for Apple AR and professional VFX pipelines
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| Extension | .usd, .usda, .usdc, .usdz |
|---|---|
| Full name | Universal Scene Description |
| Geometry type | Polygon mesh + materials + hierarchy |
| Open standard | Yes (Pixar, Apache 2.0) |
| Supports color | Yes (PBR materials) |
| Supports assemblies | Yes (scene hierarchy) |
| Supports materials | Yes (MaterialX) |
USD (Universal Scene Description) is an open-source 3D scene format developed by Pixar Animation Studios. It describes complex 3D scenes with hierarchical composition, materials, lighting, and animation. USDZ is Apple's single-file variant — a ZIP archive containing a USD file plus textures — used for AR Quick Look on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro. USD is rapidly becoming the industry standard for 3D content exchange across film, games, AR/VR, and e-commerce.
USDZ powers AR Quick Look on every iPhone and iPad. E-commerce sites, real estate listings, and product configurators use USDZ to let customers view 3D models in their real environment.
Pixar, Disney, Industrial Light & Magic, and major studios use USD as their core scene format. It handles massive film-scale scenes with thousands of assets and complex material networks.
Online retailers embed USDZ models on product pages so customers can view furniture, electronics, and fashion items in 3D and AR before purchasing — proven to increase conversion rates.
Apple Reality Composer (free), Blender (free), NVIDIA Omniverse, Autodesk Maya, Houdini, Unreal Engine. USD is supported by all major 3D applications.
3D CAD Converter reads USD and USDZ files and converts them to STL, OBJ, glTF, and 15+ other 3D formats — perfect for 3D printing, game engine import, or format standardization across your pipeline.
3D CAD Converter imports USD, USDA, USDC and USDZ and exports the scene geometry to 15+ formats. Convert one file in seconds or batch a whole folder.
Add your USD files
Drag and drop .usd, .usda, .usdc or .usdz files, or point the app at a folder full of them.
Pick an output format
Choose glTF or GLB for web and game engines, OBJ for renderers, or STL for 3D printing. Set units and tessellation quality if you need to.
Click Convert
The scene geometry is tessellated and written out. Batch mode processes every file in the folder with progress and an ETA.
Prefer the command line? The same conversions run from the CLI:
Both import and export of USD are supported, so you can also go the other way and write USD from STEP, OBJ, glTF and more.
USD is the scene-description backbone of modern 3D. Pixar built it to manage film-scale scenes, and it has since become the common language of VFX, NVIDIA Omniverse collaboration, and Apple AR. The USDZ variant is what powers AR Quick Look on iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro, so a single zipped USD file can be tapped to view a product in your living room.
When you need that scene geometry somewhere else, conversion is the practical step. Convert to USDZ to hand a model to iOS AR viewers, convert to glTF or GLB to drop it into a web viewer or game engine, or convert to STL to print it. 3D CAD Converter focuses on getting the geometry, materials and hierarchy across cleanly, rather than trying to preserve every advanced USD composition feature.
USD ships as readable ASCII (.usda), compact binary (.usdc) and zipped packages (.usdz). Many tools only read one of them. 3D CAD Converter reads all four extensions (.usd, .usda, .usdc, .usdz) so you do not have to repackage anything first.
Film and Omniverse scenes can be enormous, with thousands of assets and deep hierarchies. Conversion flattens that into usable mesh geometry; use a coarser tessellation and batch mode to keep large scenes manageable.
Not every renderer or game engine reads USD natively yet. Converting to glTF, GLB or OBJ gives you a file that opens everywhere, while USDZ remains the right target specifically for iOS AR viewers.
A .usd file is a Universal Scene Description file, the open 3D scene format created by Pixar to describe geometry, materials, lighting and scene hierarchy. It comes as .usda (readable ASCII text), .usdc (compact binary) and .usdz (a zipped package bundling a USD file plus textures). USDZ is the variant Apple uses for AR Quick Look on iPhone, iPad and Apple Vision Pro.
You do not need Blender, NVIDIA Omniverse or the Pixar USD command-line tools. 3D CAD Converter opens .usd, .usda, .usdc and .usdz directly and converts the scene geometry to a mesh format you can use anywhere, such as glTF, OBJ or STL. On macOS you can also preview a USDZ in Quick Look.
Drop the .usd or .usdz file into 3D CAD Converter, choose glTF or GLB and click Convert, or run cadconvert convert -i scene.usd -o scene.glb from the command line. glTF is the natural web and game-engine target for USD scene geometry, and a whole folder can be converted with cadconvert batch -i ./in -o ./out -f usd -r.
Yes. 3D CAD Converter offers a free trial that imports USD, USDA, USDC and USDZ and exports the scene geometry to glTF, GLB, OBJ, STL and 15+ other formats, including batch folders, with control over units and tessellation. No credit card is required to try it on Windows 10 or 11.