# GANcraft: Unsupervised 3D Neural Rendering of Minecraft Worlds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.07659 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07659/

## Key facts

- Cited by 98 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Spectral Normalization for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05957/) (2018)
- [D-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13961/) (2020)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis and Semantic Manipulation with Conditional GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11585/) (2017)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Neural Sparse Voxel Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11571/) (2020)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [NeRF++: Analyzing and Improving Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07492/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.04732/) (2018)
- [GIRAFFE: Representing Scenes as Compositional Generative Neural Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12100/) (2020)
- [Neural Scene Flow Fields for Space-Time View Synthesis of Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13084/) (2020)
- [pi-GAN: Periodic Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00926/) (2020)
- [Differentiable Volumetric Rendering: Learning Implicit 3D Representations without 3D Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07372/) (2019)
- [GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02442/) (2020)
- [MaskGAN: Towards Diverse and Interactive Facial Image Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11922/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [NeRV: Neural Reflectance and Visibility Fields for Relighting and View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03927/) (2020)
- [NeRD: Neural Reflectance Decomposition from Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03918/) (2020)
- [Space-time Neural Irradiance Fields for Free-Viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12950/) (2020)
- [DeepVoxels: Learning Persistent 3D Feature Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01024/) (2018)
- [SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08804/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 98)

- [Magic3D: High-Resolution Text-to-3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10440/) (2022)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12423/) (2021)
- [RegNeRF: Regularizing Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis from Sparse Inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00724/) (2021)
- [LION: Latent Point Diffusion Models for 3D Shape Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06978/) (2022)
- [Neural Fields in Visual Computing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11426/) (2021)
- [GET3D: A Generative Model of High Quality 3D Textured Shapes Learned from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11163/) (2022)
- [Decomposing NeRF for Editing via Feature Field Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15585/) (2022)
- [OmniObject3D: Large-Vocabulary 3D Object Dataset for Realistic Perception, Reconstruction and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07525/) (2023)
- [Urban Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14643/) (2021)
- [GRAM: Generative Radiance Manifolds for 3D-Aware Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08867/) (2021)
- [WonderJourney: Going from Anywhere to Everywhere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03884/) (2023)
- [GPT-4V(ision) is a Human-Aligned Evaluator for Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04092/) (2024)
- [SUDS: Scalable Urban Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14536/) (2023)
- [EpiGRAF: Rethinking training of 3D GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10535/) (2022)
- [Generative Neural Articulated Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14314/) (2022)
- [InfiniteNature-Zero: Learning Perpetual View Generation of Natural Scenes from Single Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11148/) (2022)
- [CityDreamer: Compositional Generative Model of Unbounded 3D Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00610/) (2023)
- [DiffusionRig: Learning Personalized Priors for Facial Appearance Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06711/) (2023)
- [SceneDreamer: Unbounded 3D Scene Generation from 2D Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01330/) (2023)
- [InfiniCity: Infinite-Scale City Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09637/) (2023)
- [Unified Implicit Neural Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01943/) (2022)
- [Texturify: Generating Textures on 3D Shape Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02411/) (2022)
- [GAN-Supervised Dense Visual Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05143/) (2021)
- [Generative Multiplane Images: Making a 2D GAN 3D-Aware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10642/) (2022)
- [MARLIN: Masked Autoencoder for facial video Representation LearnINg](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06627/) (2022)
- [VFusion3D: Learning Scalable 3D Generative Models from Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12034/) (2024)
- [3D GAN Inversion for Controllable Portrait Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13441/) (2022)
- [Neural Point Light Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01473/) (2021)
- [DiffDreamer: Towards Consistent Unsupervised Single-view Scene Extrapolation with Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12131/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present GANcraft, an unsupervised neural rendering framework for generating photorealistic images of large 3D block worlds such as those created in Minecraft. Our method takes a semantic block world as input, where each block is assigned a semantic label such as dirt, grass, or water. We represent the world as a continuous volumetric function and train our model to render view-consistent photorealistic images for a user-controlled camera. In the absence of paired ground truth real images for the block world, we devise a training technique based on pseudo-ground truth and adversarial training. This stands in contrast to prior work on neural rendering for view synthesis, which requires ground truth images to estimate scene geometry and view-dependent appearance. In addition to camera trajectory, GANcraft allows user control over both scene semantics and output style. Experimental results with comparison to strong baselines show the effectiveness of GANcraft on this novel task of photorealistic 3D block world synthesis. The project website is available at https://nvlabs.github.io/GANcraft/ .