JT (Jupiter Tessellation) is an openly-published ISO-standardized 3D CAD data exchange format used for product visualization, collaboration, digital mockups, and other purposes.
The JT format contains a scene graph representation of an assembly, nested sub-assemblies of parts with CAD specific node and attributes data.
Product and Manufacturing Information (PMI), Precise Part definitions (BRep), additional metadata, and a variety of representation configurations are supported.
The format and associated software is structured so that extremely large numbers of components can be quickly loaded, shaded and manipulated in real-time.
JT is often used for Digital mock-up (DMU) work, which allows engineers to validate that a product can be assembled without interferences long before a physical prototype could be produced.
Leveraging JT for digital mock-up allows users to reduce or eliminate costly physical prototypes and enables decision-making to occur much earlier in the development process.
Finally, JT is used as a CAD interoperability format for exchanging design data for Collaborative Product Development, where JT files are created by translating data from CAD systems such as NX (Unigraphics), Creo Elements/Pro, FORAN, I-DEAS, Solid Edge, Catia, Microstation or Autodesk Inventor.
The JT file format is capable of storing an arbitrary number of faceted representations with varying levels of detail (LODs).
End of August 2010 the Ballot for the New Work Item (NWI) proposal for JT as ISO International Standard was started by ProSTEP iViP.
For providing additional functionalities and innovations required by industry, ProSTEP iViP and VDA decided mid of 2015 to specify a so-called JT Industrial Application Package (JTIAP),[6] which is a JT file format specification completely compatible to ISO 14306 (V1 as well as the future V2) and currently existing JT-Open-based implementations.
Thereby, JTIAP provide a more comprehensive compression algorithm (LZMA), specifies XT B-rep as recommended representation of exact geometry and allows the neutral and royalty-free implementation of JT.
Support for standard compression is maintained only in the interest of backward compatibility with legacy JT file viewing applications.