What is maquette?

Maquette is a macOS app that takes a photograph and produces a 3D model you can use in games, on the web, or in augmented reality on an iPhone. You drop a photo in, and two AI models work together in a loop. One model writes code that builds 3D geometry from scratch. The app renders that geometry from four angles, then a second model looks at the renders and compares them to your original photo. It assigns a score and tells the first model what to fix. The loop repeats, and the best scoring version is the one that gets exported as the final model. You can step in at two points during the process. The first gate lets you edit the plain language description of what the app thinks it sees in your photo. You can add details that are not visible, like saying a box should open to reveal earbuds inside. The second gate lets you modify the instruction the judge model gives to the coder model before the next cycle. You can also let the whole thing run on autopilot. Every cycle is saved, so you can pick any version to export or promote as the new starting point for further refinement. The app brings your own API key, meaning you choose which AI provider to use. Any service that matches the OpenAI interface works, including OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, and local tools like Ollama that require no key at all. Your key is stored in the macOS Keychain, never in plain files or logs. The 3D rendering happens entirely offline, so your photo never leaves your computer. The only network traffic is talking to the AI endpoint you selected. The creator notes the entire validation process cost under ten cents. Maquette runs on Apple Silicon Macs with macOS 14 or newer. You can install it through Homebrew or download a signed disk image from the GitHub releases page. A command line tool is also included for running the full process headless. The project is honest about its limits: it works best with single objects on plain backgrounds, and scores vary between runs. The code and the underlying idea are open source under the MIT license.