[fsloth]

Autodesk is huge in ’visual’ pipelines that are not directly related to engineering. Maya etc.

This is very litle about manufacturing, except you can of course always convert a model to 3D mesh for visualization etc. That is quite common, and in that workflow usd is as good as any other ’mesh plus material’ format.

The output of engineering design software usually is: 1) Shop drawings for building the whole thing or sub-assembly 2) CNC machine compatible presentation 3) 3D meshes for visualization 4) conversion to some other engineering format

You can always more or less export a 3D mesh, wich can then be 3D printed. So - printing, yes. But adds nothing to any other visua format in that workflow (stl,obj,…).