How AI Can Build a 25‑km² Virtual City in Weeks – Tencent’s 3D Scene Generation Breakthrough

On June 24, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco concluded, where Tencent AI Lab unveiled its self‑developed 3D game scene automatic generation solution powered by AIGC technology, enabling developers to create high‑fidelity, diverse virtual cityscapes in a fraction of the time.

The live demo built a 25 km² virtual city containing 130 km of road network, 4,416 buildings, and over 380,000 interior mappings—tasks that previously required years of work by dozens of artists, now completed in a few weeks.

Ability 1: Realistic City Layout Generation

The AI learns from real‑world road data and can automatically generate new road layouts. Users only provide main arteries and coastline; the model fills detailed, varied roads in about one minute. The entire pipeline, from input to final road network, takes less than 30 minutes, offering roughly a 100× efficiency boost over manual design.

Ability 2: Diverse Building Facade Generation

By training on extensive real building outline and placement data, the system generates a wide variety of building shapes and layouts. In the demo, a complete building layout was produced in ten minutes, and the time to create a unique building dropped to 17.5 minutes. The AI also batch‑generates 2D facade images, which are then converted into 3D models, vastly enriching visual diversity.

Ability 3: Interior Mapping Generation

The pipeline reconstructs real rooms from multi‑view photos, estimates camera poses, trains a NeRF model, and synthesizes new‑view images for texture creation. Detected elements such as windows and balconies are automatically mapped onto prepared 3D assets, and procedural UV calculations apply pseudo‑3D interior textures. A three‑view approach reduces ghosting compared to traditional two‑view methods.

With these three core capabilities—realistic city layout, diverse building facades, and interior mappings—Tencent AI Lab now possesses the essential tools to generate lifelike virtual cities, add roads, vegetation, and seamlessly integrate them into game engines with dynamic weather, traffic, and pedestrians, showcasing a practical AI‑driven workflow for AAA game production.