The gated weights, the custom extensions, and the one-click alternative.
Stable Fast 3D (SF3D) is Stability AI's fast image-to-3D engine, and you can run it on a Mac with some setup. The weights are gated on Hugging Face, and two of its steps, texture baking and UV unwrapping, ship as custom extensions written for NVIDIA GPUs, so the Apple Silicon path takes a little work. Here is the manual route and the one-click version.
SF3D's weights are gated on Hugging Face. Sign in, accept the Stability AI Community License, and download the model. The public demo hides this required step.
Create a clean Python 3.10 or 3.11 virtual environment and install a recent PyTorch with the MPS backend, then the project requirements.
SF3D's texture_baker and uv_unwrapper extensions are written against CUDA. On a Mac you build CPU versions or route those steps through a CPU rasterizer. This is the fiddly part.
Run the inference script on a cut-out image to get a UV-unwrapped, textured GLB in seconds to a minute, depending on the path you took.
The gated weights plus the CUDA-oriented texture and UV extensions are the two things that slow a Mac setup down. Neither is a blocker, but both are manual and easy to break on an update.
3D Mate ships Stable Fast 3D as a one-click install, with the weights re-hosted (no Hugging Face account needed) and the texture and UV steps running on Apple Silicon. It runs fully offline and exports GLB, USDZ, OBJ, STL, and PLY.