A method and apparatus for spatial motion vector prediction (MVP) candidate derivation for Direct mode and Skip mode in three-dimensional video coding are disclosed. The motion vector of each neighboring block is associated with a corresponding reference picture index pointing to a corresponding reference picture. For both the Direct mode and the Skip mode, the motion vector of each neighboring block is selected as the spatial MVP candidate for each neighboring block only if the corresponding reference picture index is the same as a selected target reference picture index. In one embodiment, the target reference picture index is set to 0. In another embodiment, the target reference picture index corresponds to a majority of the corresponding reference picture indexes associated with the neighboring blocks in Direct mode or Skip mode.