Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
glTF
Also called .gltf, .glb, GL Transmission Format
An open delivery format for runtime 3D: meshes, PBR materials, skins, animation, and a scene graph, held in JSON with binary buffers laid out for direct GPU upload. Deliberately not an authoring format — no history, no NURBS, no editable construction — which is why it loads fast and round-trips badly.
In practice
Called “the JPEG of 3D”, which is right about the ubiquity and right about it being an endpoint. .glb is the single-file binary packaging; send that.
Not to be confused with
- FBXA scene format carrying meshes, hierarchies, materials, cameras, lights, skinning, and animation — the industry's working interchange for two decades. It is proprietary, versioned, and only partly documented; two applications' exporters disagree on units, axes, and material mapping often enough that an FBX round-trip is a task, not a step.
- USDA scene description with a composition engine: layers referenced, overridden, and combined non-destructively, so lighting can override an asset without editing it and hundreds of shots can share one source. It describes scenes rather than storing them — which is what makes “just export a USD” a misunderstanding of the format.
- OBJA plain-text mesh format carrying vertices, faces of any size, UVs, normals, and material references in a sidecar .mtl file. No animation, no rig, no scene hierarchy, no unit convention. Ubiquitous because it is trivial to parse and everything reads it — not because it is good at anything.