# Sat2RealCity: Geometry-Aware and Appearance-Controllable 3D Urban Generation from Satellite Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11470 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11470/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Objaverse-XL: A Universe of 10M+ 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05663/) (2023)
- [Structured 3D Latents for Scalable and Versatile 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01506/) (2024)
- [LGM: Large Multi-View Gaussian Model for High-Resolution 3D Content Creation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05054/) (2024)
- [3DShape2VecSet: A 3D Shape Representation for Neural Fields and Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11445/) (2023)
- [InstantMesh: Efficient 3D Mesh Generation from a Single Image with Sparse-view Large Reconstruction Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07191/) (2024)
- [ABO: Dataset and Benchmarks for Real-World 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06199/) (2021)
- [Hunyuan3D 2.0: Scaling Diffusion Models for High Resolution Textured 3D Assets Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12202/) (2025)
- [GS-LRM: Large Reconstruction Model for 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19702/) (2024)
- [3D-FUTURE: 3D Furniture shape with TextURE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09633/) (2020)
- [TripoSG: High-Fidelity 3D Shape Synthesis using Large-Scale Rectified Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06608/) (2025)
- [XCube: Large-Scale 3D Generative Modeling using Sparse Voxel Hierarchies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03806/) (2023)
- [Hunyuan3D 2.1: From Images to High-Fidelity 3D Assets with Production-Ready PBR Material](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15442/) (2025)
- [Hunyuan3D 2.5: Towards High-Fidelity 3D Assets Generation with Ultimate Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16504/) (2025)
- [Capturing, Reconstructing, and Simulating: the UrbanScene3D Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04286/) (2021)
- [Step1X-3D: Towards High-Fidelity and Controllable Generation of Textured 3D Assets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07747/) (2025)
- [Hunyuan3D 1.0: A Unified Framework for Text-to-3D and Image-to-3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02293/) (2024)
- [SparseFlex: High-Resolution and Arbitrary-Topology 3D Shape Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21732/) (2025)
- [CityDreamer: Compositional Generative Model of Unbounded 3D Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00610/) (2023)
- [ViT-CoMer: Vision Transformer with Convolutional Multi-scale Feature Interaction for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07392/) (2024)
- [Geometry-Guided Street-View Panorama Synthesis from Satellite Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01623/) (2021)
- [BuildingNet: Learning to Label 3D Buildings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04955/) (2021)
- [A General Protocol to Probe Large Vision Models for 3D Physical Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06836/) (2023)
- [RT-DETRv3: Real-time End-to-End Object Detection with Hierarchical Dense Positive Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08475/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [ArtifactWorld: Scaling 3D Gaussian Splatting Artifact Restoration via Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12251/) (2026)
- [You Only Gaussian Once: Controllable 3D Gaussian Splatting for Ultra-Densely Sampled Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21400/) (2026)
- [Sat2City v2: Native 3D City Asset Generation from a Single Satellite Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24138/) (2026)
- [STAR: A Spatial-Topology Aware Routing Framework for Generalizable 3D Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11699/) (2026)
- [GridFlow: Structured Latent Flow for Seamless City-Scale 3D Point Cloud Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29793/) (2026)
- [KODAMA: Multimodal Digital Twin Reconstruction for Urban RF Propagation Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07298/) (2026)
- [CityCode: Building Agent-Operable 3D Cities from Sparse Aerial Observations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18342/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D urban generation from satellite imagery is an important task for scalable digital twins and real-world simulation environments. Existing approaches primarily rely on scene-level generation paradigms, which often require large-scale 3D city assets and struggle with controllability, geographic alignment, and realistic appearance grounding in real-world urban environments. To address these limitations, we present Sat2RealCity, a grounded urban generation framework that leverages object-level 3D generative priors for scalable city synthesis from satellite imagery. Our framework decomposes cities into geographically grounded building entities, enabling the reuse of pretrained object-level 3D generative priors while preserving real-world spatial structures. Supported by our constructed BuildVerse3D dataset, (1) we introduce an OpenStreetMap (OSM)-guided spatial grounding strategy to inject geospatial constraints into the 3D generation process; (2) we design an appearance-guided controllable generation mechanism for realistic architectural appearance and regional style consistency; and (3) we construct an MLLM-powered semantic pipeline for regional appearance understanding and semantic-aware appearance synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sat2RealCity achieves strong geographic alignment, regional stylistic consistency, and plausible urban asset synthesis compared with existing urban generation and 3D asset generation approaches.