Posted by juscha1 6 hours ago
Hi HN! Showcasing this fun project. I took 1300 square miles of the SF Bay Area from Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and transformed them into a cohesive pixel map. It's really fun to explore and stumble upon various famous landmarks like Apple Park, Palace of Fine Arts, or UC Berkeley.
The technicals involve using Nano Banana 2 to train a Qwen-Image-Edit 2511 LoRA which is used to prototype the style and generation methods. For final map I used Qwen to train a Klein 4B LoRA which reproduced the style at 1/4 of the cost. More details in the blog post.
Let me know what you think! I really enjoyed this process of fine-tuning smaller open source models.
If I did the map with Nano Banana 2 it would have cost around 7k USD!
Credit for the idea goes to Isometric NYC.
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!
Technicals written by Fable at the end of this post: https://www.justinchavez.com/blog/isometric-sf/
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 :(
(I couldn't find it, if it already exists.)