Skywork Matrix-3D: Turning a Single Image into an Explorable 3D World

On August 25, @mickmumpitz posted a thread open-sourcing a fully local, free workflow for turning a single image into an explorable 3D world. Built on Skywork Matrix-3D, the core idea is to fly a virtual 360-degree drone through the scene, traversing and recording the world to generate a synthetic dataset for training Gaussian Splat.

Confirmed

The method comes from Skywork's data production pipeline: a virtual 360-degree drone was programmed in Unreal Engine 5 to fly through 504 game environments, rendering 116,759 panoramic sequences with ground-truth depth and camera poses to train Matrix-3D, enabling full 3D world completion from a single panorama
The workflow is released step by step: first, depth is estimated from a 360° panorama to generate a coarse mesh; the illusion breaks the moment the camera moves, and Matrix-3D fills the holes and "imagines" areas not captured in the photo
The author ported the pipeline to ComfyUI with lightx2v integration, and built a custom drone path editor for planning virtual camera trajectories in panoramic scenes
To address Wan's 720p cap on 360 video generation and the blurriness when stretched onto a sphere, the author tried upscaling but found it too slow, and instead leveraged known camera data and geometry to re-project the original 8K panorama directly onto the generated 360 video, recovering HD detail while preserving generated content

Why it matters

The entire pipeline is fully local and free, lowering the barrier to single-image-to-3D-world generation; the synthetic data + Gaussian Splat training paradigm and the 8K re-projection sharpening trick are valuable references for the 3D generation and panoramic video communities

2026-08-25 ~ 2026-08-25 · 5 related posts

Primary sources

Turn a single image into an explorable 3D world — locally, for free — mickmumpitz · 2026-08-25 23:34 (UTC+08:00)
One Panorama to an Explorable 3D World: Matrix-3D Fills the Holes — mickmumpitz · 2026-08-25 23:34 (UTC+08:00)
Skywork flew a virtual drone through 504 UE5 scenes, rendering 116K panoramas — mickmumpitz · 2026-08-25 23:34 (UTC+08:00)

[source] One Panorama to an Explorable 3D World: Matrix-3D Fills the Holes — mickmumpitz · 2026-08-25
[source] Turn a single image into an explorable 3D world — locally, for free — mickmumpitz · 2026-08-25
[source] Skywork flew a virtual drone through 504 UE5 scenes, rendering 116K panoramas — mickmumpitz · 2026-08-25
Skywork 360 pipeline ported to ComfyUI with a custom drone path editor — mickmumpitz · 2026-08-25
Wan 360 caps at 720p? Reproject the original 8K panorama back instead — mickmumpitz · 2026-08-25