Why "Land of Assets" Standardizes on glTF for the Master Asset

Over the course of my career—from contributing to Three.js and the glTF standardization committee, to building 3D tools at companies like Exocortex, ThreeKit, and Frantic Films—I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how 3D data moves. Whether in VFX pipelines or web-based product visualizers, the core challenge is almost always the same: interchangeability.

Today, at my new endeavor, "Land of Assets," we tackle the massive investment that goes into creating core visualization assets. Whether these 3D models are handcrafted by expert artists, generated by AI, or captured via scanning and photogrammetry, they represent a significant outlay of time and capital. To protect that investment, assets need to be future-proof. They must look consistently excellent today, tomorrow, and a decade from now, across any platform.

That is exactly why "Land of Assets" has standardized on glTF as the backbone of our Master Asset approach.

The Master Asset Concept

Before diving into the "why" of glTF, it’s crucial to understand our philosophy of the "Master Asset." A Master Asset is your single source of truth. It's a relatively high-resolution asset featuring detailed meshes and beautiful, high-res textures—something you can zoom in on and admire the craftsmanship.

You only want to pay to create this master asset once. But to guarantee it looks exactly as intended forever, it must be stored in a universally understood format. That format must prioritize broad compatibility over proprietary bells and whistles.

glTF: The Distillation of Standards

This brings us to glTF's superpower: it is the distillation of standards.

glTF does not try to push the boundaries of 3D technology in any one specific dimension. Instead, it represents the common denominator. It is what the industry collectively agrees is the standard for shared 3D data.

Consider procedural geometry in Blender. Their node graphs are amazing pieces of technology, allowing for incredibly complex, non-destructive workflows. But that proceduralism is not natively interchangeable with Unreal Engine, Maya, or a WebGL viewer. Therefore, you won't find it in glTF. glTF prioritizes what can be universally read, ensuring that what you see in one tool is exactly what you get in another.

Here's an example of a glTF Master Asset from Land of Assets—you can orbit and zoom to see the result of that interchangeability:

The USD Contrast: The "Everything Tool" vs. The "Everywhere Standard"

At this point, you might be asking: "What about USD?"

Universal Scene Description (USD) is a fantastic format. In fact, at "Land of Assets," we do support exporting to USD for pipelines that explicitly require it. But we do not use it as our foundational Master Asset format.

Why? Because USD has effectively become the "everything tool." Most Digital Content Creation (DCC) applications—Maya, 3ds Max, Katana, Modo—have written custom extensions to USD to save out their highly specific features. You can write out a USD from Maya, load it back into Maya, and retain all of Maya's proprietary data.

However, if you take that Maya-flavored USD and drop it into Katana or Modo, those extensions either won't work, will barely work, or will result in an asset that looks completely different. USD is incredibly effective when you want to push the state of the art within a specific, closed pipeline where everyone is using the exact same toolset. But its fragmented nature makes it a poor standard for genuine, cross-platform interchangeability. You should not standardize your universal asset library on USD. You should standardize on glTF.

The Evolution of Standards

Of course, standards do evolve. As new technologies mature and achieve true interoperability across the ecosystem, they eventually become part of the standard.

Take MaterialX, for example. It’s a node-based material interchange format that looks poised to become the new benchmark. It currently has support in several renderers and in Maya. However, it’s still missing in 3ds Max, and it only has partial implementations in Blender and other tools. Because it is not yet fully interchangeable everywhere, it isn't the universal standard yet. But as that ecosystem matures, formats like glTF will adapt to integrate these proven, stabilized technologies.

Until then, we rely on the proven stability of the current glTF specification. Standardizing on glTF ensures your Master Asset remains the definitive, uncorrupted version of your product, ready to be deployed anywhere.

But having a perfect, high-resolution Master Asset is only half the battle. If you're dropping a massive file into an e-commerce viewer, it's going to cost you. That’s where the second half of the "Land of Assets" equation comes in: our automated optimization pipeline, which I will cover in my next post.