OpenUSD

Universal Scene Description, the open 3D scene format and software platform created by Pixar and now stewarded by the Alliance for OpenUSD; the scene layer under NVIDIA Omniverse and many simulation pipelines.

OpenUSD (Universal Scene Description) is a software platform and file format for building animated 3D scenes collaboratively, created by Pixar Animation Studios for film and visual-effects production. Its documentation describes a schema set for geometry, shading, lighting and physics, and a composition system for assembling many assets into one scene so that several tools and people can work on it at once. The Alliance for OpenUSD, a non-profit under the Joint Development Foundation whose founding members are Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk and NVIDIA, now promotes it and publishes a core specification.

For digital-twin work it is mainly a way to exchange scene data between content tools and simulators. NVIDIA Omniverse, a set of libraries for building simulation-ready worlds for robotics and industrial digital twins, lists OpenUSD as one of its core library areas, so Omniverse scenes are USD scenes; the two are related but not the same thing.

OpenUSD is open-source software with documentation and releases at openusd.org; the pages read do not name the licence. Omniverse libraries are obtained through NVIDIA's developer site and GitHub, some of them pre-release, with enterprise support sold separately.

Status: operational; the documentation read is for release 26.08.