Isometric SF
A pixel-art map of the SF Bay Area
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Technical Write-up: https://www.justinchavez.com/blog/isometric-sf-how/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.
HN · launched Nov 13, 2026 · 245 upvotes (top 5%) · 0 views
Niche: procedural map and craft pattern generators · 85 launches, 16 in the last 7 days ▲ +100% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 85 launches in procedural map and craft pattern generators →
Could you build this?
Partial The website UI and pixel-art presentation are vibe-codeable, but the core is a large-scale 3D-tile processing and rendering pipeline over 1,300 square miles, which needs graphics and geospatial expertise plus significant compute and licensed map data.
What it would actually take: The stack would be a web viewer (Three.js or similar) over a large geospatial data set, with a offline pipeline that pulls photorealistic 3D tiles through the Google Maps Platform API, renders orthographic or isometric views, and quantizes them into a pixel-art style. The hard parts are the batch rendering at scale, tile licensing and cost, and designing the pixel-art conversion so it looks cohesive. That takes graphics programming and geospatial data experience.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Retro Diffusion, easy-peasy.ai
Concerns raised: Not true pixel art: lines are anti-aliased and pixels are inconsistent, AI generation breaks down up close, with windows vanishing and walls making no sense, Looks like SimCity assets, Lacks taste; AI can't substitute for pixel artists
Feature requests: Lat/lng search or mapping, Add Computer History Museum
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 115 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #12 of 116 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 363 days after the earliest competitor.
- isometric.nyc · hn · 2026-01-22 · 1325 upvotes · similarity 0.69
- Isopolis · hn · 2026-08-03 · 350 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- isometric.nyc/snow · hn · 2026-02-23 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- isometric-cities · github · 2026-11-12 · 48 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- A giant pixel map of London · hn · 2026-10-20 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- isometricworld · github · 2026-11-09 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- LoRA Trained on SFMTA CAD Drawings to Aerial Images · hn · 2026-01-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Open-source pixel art editor with animation and auto-tiling tilesets · hn · 2026-08-07 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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