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Vector & CAD format

USDA converter

A .usda file is the human-readable half of Pixar's Universal Scene Description. It stores a scene graph — prims, their attributes, and the relationships between them — as structured text, so meshes, transforms, materials, and layer composition can be read and edited in an ordinary editor rather than through a binary tool.

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Drop USDA files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where USDA comes from

Pixar built USD from the lessons of its earlier Presto and TidScene systems and open-sourced it in 2016. The ASCII flavour was the debugging and authoring companion to the binary crate format from the start. Apple's USDZ in 2018 pushed the ecosystem into consumer AR, and the Alliance for OpenUSD, formed in 2023 by Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA, took the specification into open standardisation.

How USDA works

  • The file opens with a #usda 1.0 marker followed by an optional metadata block declaring defaultPrim, upAxis, and metersPerUnit.
  • Geometry is authored as Mesh prims carrying points, faceVertexCounts, and faceVertexIndices arrays; faces may be arbitrary polygons rather than triangles.
  • Composition arcs — sublayers, references, payloads, variants, and inherits — let one scene assemble others without copying their data.
  • Because it is text, .usda diffs cleanly in version control, which is why pipelines keep authoring layers in ASCII and publish in binary.
  • The same scene can be written as .usda or as the binary .usdc crate format with no loss; only readability and file size differ.

When to use USDA

  • Handing a scene to a tool that reads mesh geometry but not the binary USD crate format.
  • Extracting the triangle geometry from a USD layer for 3D printing or a game engine.
  • Inspecting or hand-editing a scene graph without a full digital-content-creation suite.
  • Converting a shared USD asset into a mesh format a collaborator's software already supports.

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Readable and diffable, which makes review and version control practical.
  • Composition arcs express layered scene assembly that flat mesh formats cannot represent.
  • Backed by an open specification with broad industry membership.
  • Round-trips losslessly with the binary crate format used for delivery.

Limitations

  • Files are far larger and slower to load than the equivalent binary crate.
  • References and payloads can point at other files, so a single .usda is not always self-contained.
  • Flattening to a triangle mesh discards the composition, materials, and animation the scene may carry.

Compatibility

Houdini, Maya, Blender, Omniverse, and Apple's usdzconvert all read and write the ASCII flavour, and the reference usdcat tool converts freely between it and the binary form. Novus Convert parses the text locally into triangle geometry and exports STL, OBJ, 3MF, GLB, glTF, or PLY; external references are refused rather than fetched, so nothing leaves the browser.

Scene metadata such as upAxis, metersPerUnit, and defaultPrim is read to orient and scale the geometry, but mesh targets have nowhere to record it, so the conversion keeps geometry and reports materials as flattened.

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