Just as HTML describes web pages and JSON describes data, USD describes physical worlds.

## What is USD

Universal Scene Description is a file format created by Pixar for composing complex 3D scenes. It describes geometry, materials, lighting, physics properties, and hierarchical scene composition.

## Who uses USD

- **Film and VFX:** Pixar, DreamWorks, Industrial Light & Magic
- **Automotive:** BMW, Volkswagen digital twins
- **Robotics simulation:** NVIDIA Omniverse, Isaac Sim
- **AR/VR:** Apple RealityKit, visionOS
- **Game engines:** Unreal Engine 5 native importer
- **Harmoniis:** the marketplace standard

## Why USD for robotics

A robot model in USD carries everything simulation needs:

- Joint hierarchies and articulation
- Mass properties and inertia tensors
- Collision meshes and visual meshes
- Material properties (friction, restitution, PBR textures)
- Semantic labels for perception training

An environment in USD carries:

- Scene composition (objects, lighting, cameras)
- Physics materials
- Domain randomization parameters
- Sensor configurations

## USD composes

The killer feature of USD is composition. You can layer a robot into an environment without converting formats. The same file works in [Harmoniverse](/harmoniverse) (physics), Isaac Lab (training), and UE5 (visualization).

## For artists

If you already work in USD — for film, games, automotive, or VR — your skills transfer directly to the robotics simulation vertical. The same quality standards, the same tooling, a new market that pays.

Harmoniis is the monetization layer for USD skills in robotics. Upload your assets, tag them for discovery, and earn whenever someone uses them in a simulation training pipeline.

[Start selling USD assets](/use-cases/artists) or [learn how the marketplace works](/use-cases).