What is glTF | News & Events | Specification | Resources | PBR | KTX | 3D Commerce | Tone Mapper | Community
The 3D Asset Delivery Format
glTF™ is a royalty-free specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models by engines and applications. glTF minimizes the size of 3D assets, and the runtime processing needed to unpack and use them. glTF defines an extensible publishing format that streamlines authoring workflows by enabling the interoperable use of 3D content across the industry.
What is glTF | News & Events | Specification | Resources | PBR | KTX | 3D Commerce | Tone Mapper | Community
THE 3D ASSET DELIVERY FORMAT
The core of glTF is a JSON file that describes the structure and composition of a scene containing 3D models, which can be stored in a single binary glTF file (.glb). The top-level elements of the file include: Scenes and nodes, cameras, meshes, buffers, materials, textures, skins and animations.
In 2022 glTF 2.0 was released as the ISO/IEC 12113:2022 International standard, recognizing glTF's global position as a 3D asset format.
Quick Reference Guidegltf: Helping to Make 3D Pervasive
The Open Industry Standard
glTF extensions provide a convenient mechanism to innovate and extend any part of the core glTF format. Ratified KHR extensions are widely adopted and may be included in future versions of the glTF core specification.
Essential Resources for Using glTF
Thanks to the support of the Khronos membership and our passionate developer community, there is a full set of well-supported developer tools and resources to help quickly get you up and running with your glTF application development.
THE ROUTE TO REALISM
Khronos glTF PBR defines a set of parameters that are used within glTF to simulate real-world lighting interactions, materials, and surface properties. The combination of glTF’s efficient delivery and PBR’s realism has become a game-changer for the 3D industry, empowering artists and developers to deliver compelling and visually captivating experiences. A wide range of physical properties are supported, with detailed descriptions available in the core glTF 2.0 specification and accompanying material Extensions.
The following glossary showcases some of the material effects that form part of the official Khronos PBR specification.
The Portable GPU Friendly Texture Format
KTX (Khronos Texture) is an efficient, lightweight container format supported by glTF for reliably distributing GPU textures to a diverse range of platforms to reduce asset file size and GPU memory usage. KTX adds the ability to specify textures using KTX v2 images with Basis Universal supercompression and is available in viewers and applications supporting the KHR_texture_basisu extension. The contents of a KTX file can range from a simple base-level 2D texture to a cubemap array texture with mipmaps. A wide range of open-source tools are available to help artists and developers create, convert, validate and transcode KTX compressed textures.
Learn MoreRENDER EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE
The Khronos 3D Commerce Working Group brings together industry-leading e-commerce companies to remove the barriers to deploying 3D commerce at scale using glTF. The group helps drive the development of the glTF format and ecosystem to meet the needs of 3D commerce including creating 3D authoring guidelines, tutorials and tools. Projects have included the development of the Material Variants extension and the glTF Asset Auditor and glTF Validator tools for streamlining and validating asset creation pipelines.
Learn MoreTRUE-TO-LIFE 3D COLOR RENDERING
The Khronos PBR Neutral Tone Mapper enables faithful reproduction of a product’s base color, hue and saturation when using PBR rendering under grayscale lighting, while eliminating HDR artifacts around highlights. It has been designed to display 3D assets rendered using PBR with true-to-life colors that are vital in eCommerce, architecture and CAD, and is enjoying wide adoption by 3D tools and engines
Learn MoreGet Involved
The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is constantly working to advance the use of glTF and is actively working on new initiatives to address any technical challenges, industry friction or new user requirements. Any organization is welcome to make contributions.
You'll find thriving glTF discussions on several platforms that provide a great way to get involved.
If you are working with glTF and wish to get involved in helping shape its future, please consider joining Khronos and our Working Group. Any organization is welcome to join and multiple levels of membership are available to enable any organization, large or small, to get involved.
Join KhronosThe following organizations and projects have shown public support for glTF. If you would like to add you organization to this list please Contact Us describing you use of glTF.