MLX3D

Differentiable 3D computer vision on Apple Silicon, built on MLX.

MLX3D brings the PyTorch3D workflow to Macs: batched 3D data structures, cameras, differentiable rendering, and modern view synthesis — NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting with custom Metal kernels — running natively on the Apple GPU.

📖 Documentation & tutorials

Features

• Structures — batched Meshes / Pointclouds with list, packed and padded views; differentiable normals, areas, edges.
• Cameras & transforms — OpenCV/COLMAP-convention pinhole cameras (ray generation, projection, look-at) and batched rotation conversions (quaternion, axis-angle, Euler, 6D).
• Ops & losses — GPU brute-force k-NN, chamfer distance, area-weighted surface sampling, Laplacian/edge/normal-consistency mesh losses, PSNR and differentiable SSIM.
• NeRF — positional encoding, the NeRF MLP, stratified + hierarchical sampling, volume rendering, Blender-synthetic dataset loader.
• Mesh rendering — differentiable soft triangle rasterization, UV texture sampling for OBJ/MTL assets, and scalar-field mesh extraction.
• Gaussian Splatting — a Metal translation of the reference CUDA rasterizer (tile-based forward & backward kernels wrapped in mx.custom_function), EWA projection, spherical harmonics, anti-aliased and arbitrary feature rendering, adaptive density control, COLMAP loading, and standard 3DGS .ply checkpoints. ~30 FPS forward at 720p with 100k Gaussians on an M-series GPU.
• Interactive viewer — mlx3d-view point_cloud.ply opens a browser viewer with orbit/pan/zoom; frames are rendered on the Apple GPU by the Metal rasterizer and streamed live. Works for NeRFs too.
• IO — OBJ and PLY (ascii + binary, including Gaussian Splatting checkpoint layouts), plus one-line image save_image / load_image for any renderer output.
• Composable & extensible — every image renderer is a plain callable (camera, scene) -> {"image", "alpha", "depth"} (the Renderer protocol), so you can drop in your own rasterizer, shader, or ray tracer and reuse the rest of the pipeline — no base classes to subclass.

Installation

pip install mlx3d

Requires an Apple Silicon Mac and Python ≥ 3.10.

Quick example

import mlx.core as mx
from mlx3d.cameras import Camera
from mlx3d.splatting import GaussianModel

model = GaussianModel.from_points(
    points=mx.random.normal((10_000, 3)) * 0.5,
    colors=mx.random.uniform(shape=(10_000, 3)),
)
camera = Camera.look_at(eye=(0, 0, -4), at=(0, 0, 0), width=1280, height=720)
out = model.render(camera)            # differentiable end to end
print(out["image"].shape)             # (720, 1280, 3)

Train Gaussian Splatting on any COLMAP scene (same inputs as the original 3DGS):

python examples/train_gaussian_splatting.py --data /path/to/scene --iters 7000
mlx3d-view outputs/gs/point_cloud.ply   # inspect the result interactively
mlx3d-render outputs/gs/point_cloud.ply --out render.png --antialias
mlx3d-eval outputs/gs/point_cloud.ply --data /path/to/scene --views 20 --json-out metrics.json
mlx3d-compact outputs/gs/point_cloud.ply --out point_cloud_small.ply --max-gaussians 500000

More in the docs: mesh optimization, point cloud fitting, NeRF, Gaussian Splatting.

Examples

The examples/ folder has runnable scripts for every core feature. The self-contained ones generate their own synthetic data — no downloads — and finish in seconds:

uv run python examples/render_mesh.py        # soft mesh rasterization
uv run python examples/raytrace_volume.py    # ray casting + volume rendering
uv run python examples/extract_mesh.py       # marching cubes from an SDF
uv run python examples/fit_pointcloud.py     # point-cloud optimization
uv run python examples/fit_mesh.py           # mesh fitting (chamfer + regularizers)
uv run python examples/fit_nerf.py           # train a small NeRF
uv run python examples/fit_gaussians.py      # fit 3D Gaussians
uv run python examples/extend_renderer.py    # plug in a custom renderer

See examples/README.md for the full list, including the COLMAP/Blender training scripts.

Development

Development uses uv:

git clone https://github.com/amirhossein-razlighi/mlx3D
cd mlx3D
uv sync               # creates .venv with all dev dependencies
uv run pytest tests/
uv run mkdocs serve   # docs at http://127.0.0.1:8000

Contributions are welcome — file an issue to get started.

License

MIT