# Sketch-A-Shape: Zero-Shot Sketch-to-3D Shape Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03869 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03869/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [LAION-5B: An open large-scale dataset for training next generation image-text models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08402/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [DeepSDF: Learning Continuous Signed Distance Functions for Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05103/) (2019)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [Generating Diverse High-Fidelity Images with VQ-VAE-2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00446/) (2019)
- [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)
- [MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04200/) (2022)
- [Learning Implicit Fields for Generative Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02822/) (2018)
- [Learning Robust Global Representations by Penalizing Local Predictive Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13549/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Occupancy Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04618/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Probabilistic Models for 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01458/) (2021)
- [Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08751/) (2022)
- [GRAF: Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.02442/) (2020)
- [3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00449/) (2016)
- [Learning a Probabilistic Latent Space of Object Shapes via 3D Generative-Adversarial Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07584/) (2016)
- [AtlasNet: A Papier-Mach'e Approach to Learning 3D Surface Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05384/) (2018)
- [3D Shape Generation and Completion through Point-Voxel Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03670/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Text-Guided Object Generation with Dream Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01455/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Online Clustered Codebook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15139/) (2023)
- [Make-A-Shape: a Ten-Million-scale 3D Shape Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11067/) (2024)
- [Chasing Consistency in Text-to-3D Generation from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03599/) (2023)
- [MV-CLIP: Multi-View CLIP for Zero-shot 3D Shape Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18402/) (2023)
- [Wavelet Latent Diffusion (Wala): Billion-Parameter 3D Generative Model with Compact Wavelet Encodings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08017/) (2024)
- [External Knowledge Enhanced 3D Scene Generation from Sketch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14121/) (2024)
- [One missing piece in Vision and Language: A Survey on Comics Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09502/) (2024)
- [Sketch2NeRF: Multi-view Sketch-guided Text-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14257/) (2024)
- [Sketch3D: Style-Consistent Guidance for Sketch-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01843/) (2024)
- [CymbaDiff: Structured Spatial Diffusion for Sketch-based 3D Semantic Urban Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13245/) (2025)
- [Deep Sketch-Based 3D Modeling: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03287/) (2026)
- [DC3DO: Diffusion Classifier for 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06693/) (2024)
- [Learning Hierarchical and Geometry-Aware Graph Representations for Text-to-CAD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10075/) (2026)
- [Reconstruction of a 3D wireframe from a single line drawing via generative depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13549/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Significant progress has recently been made in creative applications of large pre-trained models for downstream tasks in 3D vision, such as text-to-shape generation. This motivates our investigation of how these pre-trained models can be used effectively to generate 3D shapes from sketches, which has largely remained an open challenge due to the limited sketch-shape paired datasets and the varying level of abstraction in the sketches. We discover that conditioning a 3D generative model on the features (obtained from a frozen large pre-trained vision model) of synthetic renderings during training enables us to effectively generate 3D shapes from sketches at inference time. This suggests that the large pre-trained vision model features carry semantic signals that are resilient to domain shifts, i.e., allowing us to use only RGB renderings, but generalizing to sketches at inference time. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments investigating different design factors and demonstrate the effectiveness of our straightforward approach for generation of multiple 3D shapes per each input sketch regardless of their level of abstraction without requiring any paired datasets during training.