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USD (Universal Scene Description) is an open-source 3D scene framework created by Pixar Animation Studios. It's not just a file format — it's a scene graph API, a composition engine, and a collaboration architecture that lets multiple artists work on the same 3D scene simultaneously without stepping on each other's toes.
The format supports meshes, curves, points, volumes, materials, lights, cameras, skeletal animation, blend shapes, and arbitrary metadata. Its killer feature is "composition arcs" — references, payloads, variants, and sublayers that let you build complex scenes from modular pieces. A character can reference a rig, which references a model, which has material variants for different shots, all resolved at runtime.
USD started in Hollywood VFX (Pixar, ILM, Weta, Animal Logic) but has spread to game engines (Unreal, Unity), Apple's ecosystem (USDZ, RealityKit), NVIDIA's Omniverse platform, and architectural visualisation. It's rapidly becoming the "HTML of 3D" — a universal scene description that different renderers and tools can all understand.