Compare/Adobe Firefly 4 vs TRELLIS.2 for Mac

AI tool comparison

Adobe Firefly 4 vs TRELLIS.2 for Mac

Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.

A

Design & Creative

Adobe Firefly 4

Text-to-video, AI vectors, and smarter Generative Fill in Creative Cloud

Ship

100%

Panel ship

Community

Paid

Entry

Adobe Firefly 4 adds text-to-video generation, AI-powered vector illustration from text prompts, and an upgraded Generative Fill for Photoshop with improved edge coherence. All outputs are commercially licensed and safe, trained on Adobe Stock and licensed content. The suite is available within existing Creative Cloud plans, making it a significant capability expansion for the 30+ million Creative Cloud subscribers.

T

Creative Tools

TRELLIS.2 for Mac

Microsoft's image-to-3D model finally runs on your M-chip Mac

Ship

75%

Panel ship

Community

Paid

Entry

TRELLIS.2 for Mac is a community port that brings Microsoft's powerful image-to-3D generation model to Apple Silicon, replacing every CUDA dependency with Metal-accelerated alternatives. Feed it a single photograph and it outputs a 400K+ vertex mesh with baked PBR (physically-based rendering) textures for metallic, roughness, and base-color properties — as a GLB file ready for Blender, game engines, or AR apps. On an M4 Pro with 24GB RAM, the process takes about 5 minutes. The port is technically substantial: sparse 3D convolution uses Metal acceleration (with PyTorch fallback), mesh extraction is reimplemented in Python, attention uses PyTorch's SDPA, and texture baking leverages Metal rasterization. Every hardcoded CUDA call throughout the original codebase was patched to use the active device dynamically. The result is a model that was previously Mac-inaccessible now running natively without any cloud dependency. For 3D artists, game developers, and AR/VR creators on Apple Silicon — which is most of them these days — this removes a significant barrier. The upstream TRELLIS.2 model is MIT licensed; RMBG-2.0 background removal requires a BRIA commercial license for business use. With 202 HN points, this hit a nerve with creators frustrated that Mac hardware keeps getting excluded from serious ML workflows.

Decision
Adobe Firefly 4
TRELLIS.2 for Mac
Panel verdict
Ship · 4 ship / 0 skip
Ship · 3 ship / 1 skip
Community
No community votes yet
No community votes yet
Pricing
Included in Creative Cloud plans ($54.99/mo All Apps or $9.99/mo for individual apps); standalone Firefly credits available
Open Source
Best for
Text-to-video, AI vectors, and smarter Generative Fill in Creative Cloud
Microsoft's image-to-3D model finally runs on your M-chip Mac
Category
Design & Creative
Creative Tools

Reviewer scorecard

Creator
82/100 · ship

The vector AI output is the genuine surprise here — it produces illustrations that don't look like Midjourney's signature painterly slop or DALL-E's uncanny symmetry, but instead read like clean editorial art with actual compositional intent. The Generative Fill edge coherence upgrade is a real craft improvement: selections that previously bled into hair or complex foliage now hold their boundary without the telltale halo. The editing surface inside Photoshop is what earns this the ship — you're not generating in a silo and importing, you're generating in context, and that changes how iteration actually feels.

80/100 · ship

Photo to game-ready 3D mesh with PBR textures, no cloud, no subscription, runs on my MacBook. I've been waiting for this workflow for years. Even at 5 minutes a model, this transforms how I source assets for 3D scenes and AR projects. Absolute ship for creative work.

Skeptic
74/100 · ship

The commercial safety pitch is the only genuinely defensible moat Adobe has over Runway, Kling, or Sora — enterprise creative teams actually care about IP liability and Adobe's training data story is the cleanest in the market. Where this breaks is on video quality at launch: Firefly video has historically trailed Runway Gen-3 and Kling 2.0 on motion coherence and temporal consistency, and Adobe hasn't published head-to-head benchmarks because those benchmarks would not be flattering. The 12-month kill scenario isn't a competitor — it's Adobe's own execution risk. If the video model doesn't close the quality gap in two releases, subscribers will use Firefly for the licensed safety label and generate actual video elsewhere, making the feature a checkbox rather than a workflow.

45/100 · skip

Five minutes per mesh is 10x slower than CUDA on a decent GPU, and the output quality is only as good as the input photo and the model's training distribution. RMBG-2.0 has commercial licensing restrictions that many won't notice until they're already dependent on it. Useful for hobbyists; proceed cautiously for production.

Founder
78/100 · ship

The buyer here is crystal clear: in-house creative teams at brands and agencies who've already spent six months getting legal to approve a generative AI policy — the commercial indemnification is the product, and the image and video generation are the delivery mechanism. Adobe is brilliant at folding new capabilities into the existing per-seat renewal conversation, meaning they don't need a separate sales motion for Firefly 4. The moat question is real though: this is defensible today because enterprise procurement moves slowly, but if Getty or Shutterstock ships a commercially-safe generation suite with existing stock licensing relationships, the indemnification advantage narrows fast. The expansion revenue story is the Firefly credit top-up model — heavy generators buy credit packs on top of CC subscriptions — which is clean value-aligned pricing.

No panel take
Designer
71/100 · ship

The in-Photoshop Generative Fill workflow is where the interaction design actually earns its keep — the selection-to-prompt pipeline is genuinely native to how Photoshop users think, not a bolted-on panel that breaks the flow. The vector tool's output lands in Illustrator with editable paths, which is the correct interaction decision and one that Canva's AI vector feature still gets wrong by flattening everything. My reservation is the Firefly web app itself, which continues to feel like a demo environment with production ambitions — the generation history, project organization, and batch workflows are thin enough that most professionals will route through the desktop apps anyway, making the web surface redundant rather than additive.

No panel take
Builder
No panel take
80/100 · ship

This is the kind of community port that changes workflows. TRELLIS.2 was genuinely out of reach for Mac users; this brings it home. 5 minutes per mesh on an M4 Pro is totally usable for prototyping and concept work. The Metal acceleration implementation is clean — not a hack.

Futurist
No panel take
80/100 · ship

Every object in the physical world is a potential 3D asset — just photograph it. As ports like this land on consumer hardware, we're approaching a world where any creator can populate 3D environments from their phone camera. The 3D content bottleneck is dissolving faster than people realize.

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