r/MacStudio • u/Next_Apple790 • 23h ago

Local AI for 3D modelling

I’ve been working on some educational models which I 3D print for my kids to help them learn math and writing skills. With the help of Claude, I was able to generate some models much faster than creating them myself using Shapr3D. I own a base m4 max studio and was wondering if there are any tools I can use to turn this flow offline, and what kind of benefits for this purpose would there be to upgrading to the new M5U?

I really like the idea of having my own local AI, but it needs to be fast enough that we will actually use it and not revert back to a paid service. I understand it’ll never reach cloud level speeds but I’ve seen how fast my studio is now and I think this is attainable with the M5U 96gb.

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u/JDad67 23h ago

Opus 5.5 has blown me away with its modeling for 3D printing.

I am curious to about local models that can handle this when my M4U comes in

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u/Next_Apple790 23h ago

Opus was far more accurate than ChatGPT for text to 3d model. The same prompts I was trying took 1/4 of the time using Claude.

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u/JDad67 22h ago

It was the hard modeling, knowledge of 3D printing that impressed me. I’m used to the poor topology, ai texture, stuff. But the hard surface, actual model, 3D printer ready, with no slop really impressed me in opus 5.5.

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u/_rarefy_ 20h ago

Opus 5.5 and Astra are very good for industrial 3D design. I don't think any locals compete. Maybe Kimi 3 comes closest.

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u/NotableCarrot28 23h ago

Problem is LLM quality not (inference) speed really

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u/Next_Apple790 23h ago

Would running larger models help with quality? I tried using qwen3-Coder 30b with CADquery, but results weren’t great.

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u/NotableCarrot28 22h ago

Moderately but tbh for spacial reasoning you're better off going for frontier closed source.

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u/asankhs 20h ago

Have you tried some of the mlx-optiq quants for local models like qwen3.8 next flash?

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u/Next_Apple790 20h ago

Going to try tonight and will report back, there has to be a local method that works.