An environment synthesis framework generates virtual environments from a synthesized two-dimensional (2D) satellite map of a geographic area, a three-dimensional (3D) voxel environment, and a voxel-based neural rendering framework. In an example implementation, the synthesized 2D satellite map is generated by a map synthesis generative adversarial network (GAN) which is trained using sample city datasets. The multi-stage framework lifts the 2D map into a set of 3D octrees, generates an octree-based 3D voxel environment, and then converts it into a texturized 3D virtual environment using a neural rendering GAN and a set of pseudo ground truth images. The resulting 3D virtual environment is texturized, lifelike, editable, traversable in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) experiences, and very large in scale.