glTF is the Khronos Group’s royalty-free specification for transmitting and loading 3D scenes and models, often described as “the JPEG of 3D”. It defines a compact, runtime-ready format for geometry, materials, animation and scene structure, and it is the closest thing the games and 3D industry has to a universally adopted interchange standard.
glTF
glTF is the Khronos Group’s royalty-free specification for transmitting and loading 3D scenes and models, and it is regularly described as the JPEG of 3D. It defines a compact, runtime-ready format for geometry, materials, animation and scene structure — the emphasis on runtime-ready being the point, since it is designed to be loaded and drawn rather than edited.
- Transmission format - Optimised for delivery and load time, not for authoring.
- JSON plus binary - A JSON document describing the scene, with buffers held inline or beside it;
.glbpacks everything into one file. - PBR materials - Physically based rendering as a first-class part of the format, which is what made cross-engine visual consistency achievable.
- Extension ecosystem - A registered extension mechanism lets vendors add capability without forking the core.
glTF is the closest thing the games and 3D industry has to a universally adopted interchange standard, and unusually for this catalog it has an artifact story to match: a published JSON Schema, a validator, and a specification in a public registry. OpenUSD occupies the neighbouring role for scene composition and authoring, and the two are complementary rather than competing.
Industry: 3D Graphics
Also in the data model catalog
This standard shows up on both sides of the house — as a standard applied in API operations here, and as a data model defining what information exists. Same standard, two lenses.
See it as a data model →