Isometric SF - Pixel-art map of the SF Bay Area
Show HN: Isometric SF – A pixel-art map of the SF Bay Area
Isometric SF transforms the entire San Francisco Bay Area into a browsable isometric pixel-art map. Built with Leaflet and rendered from Google Maps Photorealistic 3D Tiles, OpenStreetMap data, ESA WorldCover land cover, and Copernicus elevation data, it turns real geography into a charming retro game world you can pan and zoom. Explore neighborhoods, landmarks, and terrain as hand-crafted-looking tiles, all in your browser. It's a playful way to rediscover the Bay Area, whether you're a local, a visitor, or just love pixel art. The creator has also documented the full making-of process.
Loading the Bay — the whole Bay Area reimagined as a pixel-art world you can explore tile by tile.
- drayfield
Sorry to be a downer, but this looks really bad to me. It completely lacks the sumptuous precision of real pixel art.
- mlmonkey
OP didn't mention it (or maybe I missed it), but the underlying imagery comes from the Google 3D photorealistic tiles API: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/tile/3d-til...
They offer a generous 1000 API calls per month for free, in case anyone is interested in replicating this.
- fwipsy
This is neat but maybe we could call it "pixel-art-styled?" Pixel art is all about attention to detail; this is more like applying a shader (though I see some AI artifacts in there too.)
- kenferry
…not actually pixel art though, no?
- dllu
Here's a 7388 x 5097 photo I took from a friend's Cessna of the Mission from a similar angle in 2018 which provides a nice point of reference for comparing the fine details:
https://i.dllu.net/2018-04-14-23-31-28_DSC04018_6201e8e3a215...
You can see some buildings, like 350 Treat Ave, which is a white warehouse in the middle of the photo, are blended from two colors in this isometric viewer. It's yellow on the left and grey on the right, when in fact it is uniformly white throughout. This is probably due to image generation running separately on two tiles and then blending them together.
Still, from a distance, this looks great.