SCPainter: A Unified Framework for Realistic 3D Asset Insertion and Novel View Synthesis

3D Asset insertion and novel view synthesis (NVS) are key components for autonomous driving simulation, enhancing the diversity of training data. With better training data that is diverse and covers a wide range of situations, including long-tailed driving scenarios, autonomous driving models can become more robust and safer. This motivates a unified simulation framework that can jointly handle realistic integration of inserted 3D assets and NVS. Recent 3D asset reconstruction methods enable reconstruction of dynamic actors from video, supporting their re-insertion into simulated driving scenes. While the overall structure and appearance can be accurate, it still struggles to capture the realism of 3D assets through lighting or shadows, particularly when inserted into scenes. In parallel, recent advances in NVS methods have demonstrated promising results in synthesizing viewpoints beyond the originally recorded trajectories. However, existing approaches largely treat asset insertion and NVS capabilities in isolation. To allow for interaction with the rest of the scene and to enable more diverse creation of new scenarios for training, realistic 3D asset insertion should be combined with NVS. To address this, we present SCPainter (Street Car Painter), a unified framework which integrates 3D Gaussian Splat (GS) car asset representations and 3D scene point clouds with diffusion-based generation to jointly enable realistic 3D asset insertion and NVS. The 3D GS assets and 3D scene point clouds are projected together into novel views, and these projections are used to condition a diffusion model to generate high quality images. Evaluation on the Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate the capability of our framework to enable 3D asset insertion and NVS, facilitating the creation of diverse and realistic driving data.