HN

Need help?
<- Back
Show HN: Isometric SF – A pixel-art map of the SF Bay Area

Show HN: Isometric SF – A pixel-art map of the SF Bay Area

juscha1

Comments (49)

  • drayfield
    Sorry to be a downer, but this looks really bad to me. It completely lacks the sumptuous precision of real pixel art.
  • mlmonkey
    OP didn't mention it (or maybe I missed it), but the underlying imagery comes from the Google 3D photorealistic tiles API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/tile/3d-til...They offer a generous 1000 API calls per month for free, in case anyone is interested in replicating this.
  • fwipsy
    This is neat but maybe we could call it "pixel-art-styled?" Pixel art is all about attention to detail; this is more like applying a shader (though I see some AI artifacts in there too.)
  • kenferry
    …not actually pixel art though, no?
  • dllu
    Here's a 7388 x 5097 photo I took from a friend's Cessna of the Mission from a similar angle in 2018 which provides a nice point of reference for comparing the fine details:https://i.dllu.net/2018-04-14-23-31-28_DSC04018_6201e8e3a215...You can see some buildings, like 350 Treat Ave, which is a white warehouse in the middle of the photo, are blended from two colors in this isometric viewer. It's yellow on the left and grey on the right, when in fact it is uniformly white throughout. This is probably due to image generation running separately on two tiles and then blending them together.Still, from a distance, this looks great.
  • 30minAdayHN
    This is so beautiful! Something soothing and ultra clean about it. Maybe all the maps should have this rendered version as default.
  • scosman
  • AntonyGarand
    I thought I already saw that project few months ago, but turns out it's a similar submission under the same concept: "Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF "!Looks great, I love the style you chose, it was enjoyable to move around and explore[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149966
  • armcat
    I've done something similar with generating pixel-style images of Stockholm. Unfortunately imagegen models are quite bad at localised details. It looks good on the surface, but when you look closer or zoom in you see structurally things that don't make sense, like windows disappearing, or walls just not making any sense at all.
  • nphardon
    this is really cool, but I wish it was oriented north south (maybe thats not as pleasing re the isometry?), just because that's how I think about the city and navigating it, so this makes me like, instinctually rotate my head.
  • ubasu
    This misses large parts of the Bay Area, which is nine counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma, and San Francisco. Here, pretty much everything east of 680 and north of the Richmond Bridge is missing. No Mt. Diablo, no Livermore, only bits of Dublin, Pleasanton, San Ramon etc.
  • kristopolous
    lat/lng mapping would be great
  • leugim
    How much it cost you paint per km2 after training the model? I did (and publish here) https://www.tinyvalencia.com and got to 0.4$ per km2 after training the model (for 15$ or so).
  • cmdoptesc
    Hi Justin, great writeup!I really appreciate your human-written documentation because it's nice to read your thought process instead of LLM marketing soundbites.re: orientation. I know it's creator's choice, but for me, it's either north or west towards the ocean. East makes me want to hold shift to rotate. :)Thanks for making and sharing this!
  • dnlzro
    I've been seeing a lot of these kinds of projects make the rounds on Twitter lately. Yours is just as good as the best of them, so great job making it more efficient without loss of quality!But... I'm always disappointed when I zoom in and see that it's not actually pixel art, and it's full of the kinds of artifacts that are typical of any AI-generated imagery :(
  • thot_experiment
    It's always heartening to see stuff like this because it really throws into stark illumination just how much AI just can't make up for a lack of taste.
  • Conscat
    Wow, it captured the pool in my apartment complex. I love this! I was a bit disoriented by north being left.
  • packeted
    Found my house in East Bay and it looks accurate, cool.
  • gojomo
    Is there any way to rotate the perspective, as in Google Maps with 2-finger gestures (touchscreens) or shift-drags (mice/etc)?(I couldn't find it, if it already exists.)
  • va3ndf
    This is my favorite one yet! I used to live in SoMa and this captured my apartment and the nearby Caltrain wonderfully!
  • modeless
    This style seems achievable while retaining 3D rendering if the tiles are preprocessed in 3D instead of 2D and some clever shaders are used.
  • xixixao
    Awesome. Next step: Make the trains and cars move!
  • NeuraCryption
    This is amazing and is 1:1 global map. Did you use google maps API to build this or UE5?
  • blobbers
    Just wanted to say... this is beautiful!
  • EarlKing
    Grossly inaccurate due to lack of pixelized piles of human feces.
  • yboris
    Impressive! And the aesthetics look great!
  • bastiilling
    Looks great!
  • ex-aws-dude
    Can't seem to find Computer History MuseumAnyone able to?
  • jeffbee
    Not bad. I feel like instead of using an image-mode model, it would be better to use a code model that generates the scene. Reason I think this is that the image generators aren't respecting the rules of "pixel art". Straight lines and flat planes are straight and flat in pixel art. These images are wavy and irregular.
  • elxr
    Not pixel art. Downvoted