What is Gantry
Gantry converts industry-standard 3D formats to USDZ for Apple platforms. It imports FBX, glTF, OBJ, and STL files, previews them in a RealityKit-powered viewport, and exports USDZ with full PBR material integrity.
What Gantry does
Section titled “What Gantry does”Convert. Gantry takes formats from your DCC tool — Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D, or anywhere else — and produces USDZ files for AR Quick Look, visionOS apps, and iOS experiences.
Preview. The viewport uses RealityKit, the same renderer Apple platforms use at runtime. You see accurate materials, accurate lighting, and accurate geometry before anything leaves Gantry.
Edit. The Material Editor lets you tweak materials per scene: choose USD Preview Surface or MaterialX, adjust per-channel values, and replace textures. What you see in the viewport is what you get in the exported file.
Optimize. Texture Optimization compresses textures per channel — JPEG, PNG, or AVIF output with mipmap generation. KTX2 with Apple Texture Converter is available for runtime delivery to RealityKit; see Optimizing Textures for when to use it.
What Gantry does not do
Section titled “What Gantry does not do”Gantry does not validate or repair USD scenes. It does not run RealityKit compatibility checks, diagnose structural issues, or apply automated fixes. That is Preflight’s job.
If you import a model into Gantry and the export looks wrong — materials missing, geometry broken, textures incorrect — see Gantry and Preflight for when to reach for Preflight instead.
Who Gantry is for
Section titled “Who Gantry is for”3D artists and hobbyists who have models in Blender, Cinema 4D, or asset libraries and want to get them into USDZ format without writing code.
Apple developers building AR experiences or visionOS apps who need a reliable way to convert assets from their DCC tool and preview them before integrating into Xcode.
Content creators staging models, swapping textures, and capturing screenshots for social or promotional use.
Technical artists who need full material control — USD Preview Surface, MaterialX, KTX2 compression — without a full validation workflow.
Named after the launch gantry
Section titled “Named after the launch gantry”A launch gantry is the structure that services and prepares a vehicle before launch. It handles the structural prep. The vehicle does the flight.
That is the relationship between this tool and the asset pipeline: Gantry prepares the model. Preflight checks it. The asset ships.