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.

"Satellite images from highly oblique angles are pretty mindblowing"

If u like this u will like that

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...

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.

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.

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?

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

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.