Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF

Posted by nuwandavek 12 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by lawrencechen 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by RugnirViking 1 hour ago

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 codex hasn't done a very good job of explaining some of the concepts in the dev blog, they drift into the word-soupy at times. 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

Comment by simonw 9 hours ago

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

Love that attitude. Me too!

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

very inspired by you!

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by 9 hours ago

Comment by rob74 5 hours ago

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...

Comment by RugnirViking 1 hour ago

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. "

Comment by sgt 1 minute ago

Sim City 2000 for example had elevation [1]. The issue is that LLM's simply don't "get this". It's vibecoded.

[1] https://patcoston.com/sc2k/city/images/Calebopolis_Big.png

Comment by sgt 3 hours ago

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

Comment by notpushkin 3 hours ago

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”.

Comment by sgt 3 minutes ago

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.

Comment by EZ-Cheeze 8 hours ago

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

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

woahhh, these are so beautiful!

Comment by murphyslab 11 hours ago

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/

Comment by tamimio 10 hours ago

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!

Comment by murphyslab 10 hours ago

Men in Black: https://floor796.com/#b2r4,541,605

Naruto: https://floor796.com/#t2l4,684,675

The author continues adding and refining the project, so if it isn't in there yet, perhaps in the future.

Comment by tamimio 10 hours ago

Nice, love it!

Comment by smusamashah 10 hours ago

i remember seein men in black here

Comment by codetiger 6 hours ago

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/

Comment by tda 4 hours ago

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

Comment by codetiger 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by Palomides 36 minutes ago

>ghibli-style pixel-art

I suppose that explains the yellow filter and the mixels

Comment by jtfrench 10 hours ago

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!

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

ty!

Comment by cpfohl 37 minutes ago

Unwanted sound! Not cool.

Comment by cyanregiment 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

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!

Comment by accrual 11 hours ago

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!

Comment by yreg 5 hours ago

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?

Comment by jcarrano 4 hours ago

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

Comment by qurren 9 hours ago

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

Comment by wxw 10 hours ago

I'm reminded of the wonderful https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc project, also previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46721802

This could be a great anecdotal benchmark for agent/model progress. I wonder how much easier things have gotten with the latest Codex/Claude vs. when isometric.nyc was made.

Comment by flomo 9 hours ago

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)

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

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

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

more zoom enabled!

Comment by mnky9800n 5 hours ago

This reminds me of my own project https://rainy-city.com

Comment by bestony 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by montag 10 hours ago

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?

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by toplinesoftsys 9 hours ago

Fantastic project! Sim-city over San Francisco.

Comment by harrisonpage 11 hours ago

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

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

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

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

more zoom enabled!

Comment by burnoutdv 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by greatony 12 hours ago

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

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

haha ty!

Comment by hasyimibhar 5 hours ago

Sorry but that is not pixel art.

Comment by jullls 3 hours ago

Reminds me "transport tycoon", very cool!

Comment by quemtrouxe 2 hours ago

it's pretty interesting

Comment by danenania 10 hours ago

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

Comment by nuwandavek 8 hours ago

hey thanks! i wrote it all up here: https://sf.isopolis.city/dev.html

Comment by Zaheer 7 hours ago

Similar take by Levels.fyi: https://www.levels.fyi/atlas

Comment by chaostheory 7 hours ago

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

Comment by nee_oo_ru 10 hours ago

time to push the boundaries of your creation

Comment by astaka 7 hours ago

that's pretty cool...

Comment by digg99 1 hour ago

well done! The opening music made me lol

Comment by j117noai 11 hours ago

This is really cool!

Comment by vortegne 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by receptopalak 4 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by nerdsniper 11 hours ago

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