Abstract We study the problem of learning generative models of 3D shapes. Voxels or 3D parts have been widely used as the underlying representations to build complex 3D shapes; however, voxel-based representations suffer from high memory requirements, and parts-based models require a large collection of cached or richly parametrized parts. We take an alternative approach: learning a generative model over multi-view depth maps or their corresponding silhouettes, and using a deterministic rendering function to produce 3D shapes from these images. A multi-view representation of shapes enables generation of 3D models with fine details, as 2D depth maps and silhouettes can be modeled at a much higher resolution than 3D voxels. Moreover, our approach naturally brings the ability to recover the underlying 3D representation from depth maps of one or a few viewpoints. Experiments show that our framework can generate 3D shapes with variations and details. We also demonstrate that our model has out-of-sample generalization power for real-world tasks with occluded objects.