alt.hn

8/3/2026 at 12:46:38 AM

Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF

 https://sf.isopolis.city/

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 2:31:05 AM

Behind the scenes stuff:

https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html

> The source is Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. Isometric.nyc explored and rejected the use of 3d building data. It is pretty insane that US gov has free LIDAR data for every city in the US available to the public. I spent <30mins exploring this and stuck to google 3d images. Claude Code whipped up a scraper to stream the 3D Tiles and render with three.js. This gives the best "real" texture base for the model to learn from. Anything else would involve a LOT of manual work to get the inputs right.

> Now that we have the 3D tiles, we need to generate the ground truth pairs for training! Similar to isometric.nyc, I generated a few ghibli-style pixel-art images using Google's Nano Banana. SF terrain is very interesting. There are quite a few distinct features like skyscrapers in FiDi, the hills in the southeast, 2 iconic bridges, lots of coastline, piers, parks, suburban grids and lots of water. I generated a ton of images and curated from them. Getting consistent style was a challenge. There was a LOT of manual trial and error. But as usual, Claude Code added this feature to the dev app that allowed me to select the best images and approve them.

by lawrencechen

8/3/2026 at 3:22:28 AM

> I'm stoked for the golden era of side-projects!

Love that attitude. Me too!

by simonw

8/3/2026 at 4:38:19 AM

very inspired by you!

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 8:32:27 PM

[dead]

by hacklewoodple

8/3/2026 at 8:30:35 PM

[dead]

by hacklewoodple

8/3/2026 at 8:30:50 PM

[dead]

by hacklewoodple

8/3/2026 at 4:37:54 AM

glad you liked it!

I had to leave out a ton of details in the training process. But at every step, codex/cc built me a dev tool to navigate the complexity. That was such a unique side project experience.

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 12:06:30 PM

interesting with the alcatraz island - I notice its invented some houses, and turned a cruise ship into a rock. I appreciate the difficulty and getting a lora to understand it - despite this the finished project is beautiful

I also feel that some of the technical explanations are a little dense here in the dev blog. I forget who it was who I saw mentioning it here on HN, but I've been having a lot of success with getting models to (re)write technical explanations in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English

by RugnirViking

8/3/2026 at 3:56:53 PM

Really cool stuff

by pcpliu

8/3/2026 at 2:13:29 PM

Honest opinion: Really charming on first look, but nothing where you can get lost in the details, because once you look closer, the soullessness of the generated imagery comes through. So I spent about 5 minutes looking at it, then moved on, and likely won't ever go back there. With other things, like Floor796 that other people pointed out, I can spend so much time looking at all the labor of love that went in there, but making something to look at too closely likely wasn't the point here.

by karpour

8/3/2026 at 4:53:05 PM

For context, Floor796: https://floor796.com/

Note that clicking the characters shows extra information.

Protip, visit About -> FAQ; there are many interesting questions like “What interactive elements are there?”.

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46401612 (and others).

by thih9

8/3/2026 at 4:58:10 PM

Wait, that's an example of something that's supposed to be better?

by cj

8/3/2026 at 3:00:51 PM

Ouch, this seems unnecessarily harsh for a side project made for fun. This might be acceptable if this was a low effort single prompt to an AI but it’s pretty clear from the write up that that is far from the case.

FWIW I thought this was really cool.

by johnfn

8/3/2026 at 3:59:27 PM

For me it's the copy, it really does read as soulless slop and I think there are many people who are just tired of it.

by jihadjihad

8/3/2026 at 8:46:13 PM

I was thinking the same..in fact it made me think enough that I wrote a blog/rant article about the topic AND created then a HN account. Well not this one specifically but all the other projects together I have seen recently and I just happened to have time today https://burnoutdv.bearblog.dev/the-golden-age-of-hobbyiest-p...

by burnoutdv

8/3/2026 at 11:45:49 PM

v cool!

by vldszn

8/3/2026 at 4:16:05 AM

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/these-oblique-satell...

"Satellite images from highly oblique angles are pretty mindblowing"

If u like this u will like that

by EZ-Cheeze

8/3/2026 at 4:21:39 AM

woahhh, these are so beautiful!

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 4:10:53 PM

I haven't used it but Vexcel makes oblique imagery available. They use planes I believe to get multiple passes of each are they image and from various angles. Then they combine it and make the maps available.

https://vexceldata.com/

by dendrite9

8/3/2026 at 8:01:09 AM

Nice! But for a city renowned for its steep streets, this looks suspiciously flat :) Ok, you could say it's only a 3D rendering of a 2D map, and it probably has to be this way for practical reasons, to avoid hills obscuring objects behind them, because you can't rotate the map as far as I can see, but not seeing actual height represented in a 3D view still takes some getting used to.

Also, there are neighbourhoods and landmarks, but not actual street names as far as I can see? Not to mention transit stops/lines and other fancy stuff one could add...

by rob74

8/3/2026 at 9:24:24 AM

It's vibe coded. LLM's have a hard time understanding elevation and isometric display.

by sgt

8/3/2026 at 10:02:54 AM

It’s vibe coded but it’s not slop. There’s a lot of human input here. So either the author overlooked the elevation issue or it was a deliberate decision, but in any case you can’t just pin this on “LLMs don’t understand isometric 3D”.

by notpushkin

8/3/2026 at 1:07:29 PM

I've been busy with a rendered isometric map recently and I figured this is something Opus can help with, but it was near useless at understanding isometric designs along with elevation changes. It kept me busy for days.

by sgt

8/3/2026 at 12:09:47 PM

from his dev blog: "All map math happens in a single fixed ... plane... The intended effect was a classic Sim City view of the city. "

by RugnirViking

8/3/2026 at 1:50:22 AM

Incredible. It's easy to just go on browsing and exploring. The massive, scrollable pixel art aspect reminds me a little of Floor796: https://floor796.com/

by murphyslab

8/3/2026 at 2:14:44 AM

This is amazing, it got everything I could think of but not all, where’s little nightmares, silent hill, naruto, men in black, for a starter. But it’s neat regardless!

by tamimio

8/3/2026 at 2:47:58 AM

i remember seein men in black here

by smusamashah

8/3/2026 at 7:00:59 AM

This is incredibly beautiful. A few months back I tried to build a my own version of Google Earth rendered in voxels. Basically building from the terrain heightmaps scans available in open public data. Making it smooth and tessellation to work was incredible amount of work even for a simple vexed renderer https://codetiger.in/earth/

by codetiger

8/3/2026 at 8:25:00 AM

Nice, but not sure I agree with your use of voxels. It appears more like pixelated height map, not the use of 3d pixels. From what I see every position on the globe can only have a single elevation

by tda

8/3/2026 at 9:03:08 AM

Each pixel is a cube drawn at a certain height based on the terrain height map data. It’s not a volumetric render, I agree.

by codetiger

8/3/2026 at 2:26:29 AM

Those who know game dev know making good isometric maps can be deceptively difficult. You grabbed that bull by the horns and did so beautifully. Well done!

by jtfrench

8/3/2026 at 4:38:38 AM

ty!

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 1:57:27 PM

Amazing, great project. The SV show music playing on opening was such a good detail to add, loved it!

Thank you for putting this together. Brought some fun memories back from my time living in SF

by nico

8/3/2026 at 4:12:00 AM

A few AI anomalies, like several roads turning into rivers and lakes.

There are also a few massive square ponds in the Tenderloin that I am pretty sure do not exist lol

But I like the idea.

by cyanregiment

8/3/2026 at 4:51:04 AM

yeah, there are a ton of issues wrt water. I've documented a few of them here: https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html

Planning to fix in the next version!

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 2:21:57 PM

Needs a slight yellow filter over everything too.

Less #127614 more #73ba14

So it looks less like Illinois

by cyanregiment

8/3/2026 at 2:07:52 AM

This is really cool, it gives me SimCity 2000 vibes. I like that I can click on neighborhoods and regions and get more information about them!

by accrual

8/3/2026 at 1:19:18 PM

I've spent about a month all told in SF over a couple visits.

As a devout midwesterner, I didn't think I was going to enjoy the place. Having spent a bit of time there however, and having been shown around by natives, I absolutely get it.

There's so much to see and do packed in a small area, and the air just feels electric.

It's genuinely a different world.

by donatj

8/3/2026 at 4:10:12 AM

Would be extra awesome if there was a navigation app that used this map

by qurren

8/3/2026 at 7:20:05 AM

I'm currently playing with something a bit similar and I was wondering about the fair use aspect.

What's the consensus on sharing the stylized assets created by diffusion models based on reference photos from e.g. Google Earth? Can the final output be shared as public domain or do Google, Airbus, et al. still hold some rights over them?

by yreg

8/3/2026 at 8:25:49 AM

The same "fair use" as when Google trained its model on everyone else's photos.

by jcarrano

8/3/2026 at 3:51:35 AM

Just one little thing: East of Buena Vista Park, you have a lake, it is actually the road which goes around the park.

Also, I would love to zoom in more. (pls give me the pixels)

by flomo

8/3/2026 at 4:41:40 AM

Spurious lakes are an interesting issue I looked into a bit. 2 types of cases ended up becoming lakes: 1. "shadows" 2. flat green areas

I think a better data distribution should eliminate this. Also, my "water detector" was not too good and could be improved.

I wrote about a few of these things here: https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 5:02:22 AM

more zoom enabled!

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 6:18:27 PM

I lived in San Francisco for 15 years, and love this. Great work!

by aguynamedben

8/3/2026 at 2:47:15 AM

Very cool! Yesterday my wife and I watched Inside Out, and seeing the San Francisco setting felt very familiar (last year, 2025). Last year, in 2025, my wife and I went to San Francisco for our honeymoon. This website also showed me many familiar places.

by bestony

8/3/2026 at 2:11:02 AM

Really cool. I can see some issues, like Starr King park turned into a lake for some reason, but it’s so much fun to look at. Do you have any way to patch errors and discontinuities at the tile boundaries?

by montag

8/3/2026 at 4:34:48 AM

yeah, there are a ton of issues especially around water. I've documented a bunch of them here: https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html

I tried out a few ideas, but i think better training data around water will help a LOT.

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 12:34:11 PM

>ghibli-style pixel-art

I suppose that explains the yellow filter and the mixels

by Palomides

8/3/2026 at 8:30:42 PM

Wow, very impressive! But where is the bulldozer tool? I have some landscaping to do.

by bjourne

8/3/2026 at 3:43:31 AM

Fantastic project! Sim-city over San Francisco.

by toplinesoftsys

8/3/2026 at 8:57:03 AM

I am not a fan of this.

Like the new york one, its just...unpolished. I dare to say slop. I am sure the author put some effort into it, BUT its just not there for me. The wiggly lines, the blurry designs and just everything. With something is pixelart or appears to be, I expected it to be pixel perfect, not just some random picture that looks like pixelart on the first glance.

The idea feels neat, but the execution needs so much more touch and polish. Maybe even handcrafting to be impressive.

by burnoutdv

8/3/2026 at 1:13:02 AM

Amazing! I was sad I couldn't zoom in more tho

by harrisonpage

8/3/2026 at 4:26:40 AM

oooof, I can actually allow more zoom (was just embarrassed at bad pixels)

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 5:02:35 AM

more zoom enabled!

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 1:07:33 AM

THIS IS SICK! The BGM, the SFX, the visual are all perfect. My favorite is the banner plane, this is really really SF

by greatony

8/3/2026 at 4:24:38 AM

haha ty!

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 3:11:33 PM

Absolutely amazing Love to see how much we can go out of the box. Great work

by imranshah10140

8/3/2026 at 7:19:58 AM

Sorry but that is not pixel art.

by hasyimibhar

8/3/2026 at 3:02:28 PM

Wow, nice prompting!

by rambambram

8/3/2026 at 12:32:50 PM

Unwanted sound! Not cool.

by cpfohl

8/3/2026 at 4:25:26 PM

sorry! i debated this quite a bit, but the sv opening credits was too good to not include :(

by nuwandavek

8/3/2026 at 9:29:12 AM

Reminds me "transport tycoon", very cool!

by jullls

8/3/2026 at 2:14:21 AM

Super cool! Can you talk a bit about how you built it?

by danenania

8/3/2026 at 2:04:19 AM

This is really cool!

by j117noai

8/3/2026 at 2:34:45 AM

time to push the boundaries of your creation

by nee_oo_ru

8/3/2026 at 5:39:32 AM

It would be nice to have a Google or Apple maps version of this. I would also love to see this while driving.

by chaostheory

8/3/2026 at 5:17:56 AM

that's pretty cool...

by astaka

8/3/2026 at 11:05:30 AM

it's pretty interesting

by quemtrouxe

8/3/2026 at 6:56:16 AM

Crazy to me that people engage with this. This is not pixelart or any art really, it's just a weird blurry mess. Looks terrible.

by vortegne

8/3/2026 at 11:14:07 AM

well done! The opening music made me lol

by digg99

8/3/2026 at 8:53:11 AM

[flagged]

by receptopalak

8/3/2026 at 1:53:58 AM

[dead]

by nerdsniper

8/3/2026 at 1:37:15 PM

[dead]

by leviyi