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Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

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Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#121
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup the adjustment was giving cloudflare 5 bucks :)

Hah! I thought caching stuff was free. Is it because of the workers? I assumed this was all static assets. I too have been giving cloudflare 5$ for a while now :D

yeah I had to put it behind a worker to deal with the subdomain and various other subtle caching issues. All in all cloudflare is incredible, and Claude makes it actually quite easy to deal with all the ins and outs

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#122

Would it be simple to modify this to make a highly stylized version of NYC instead? Like post apocalyptic NYC or medieval NYC, night time NYC, etc. because then that would have some very interesting applications

simple is relative, could definitely be done, but until the models get a bit smarter and require less manual hand-holding it'd be a lot of grindy work

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#123

This doesn't really look like pixel art; it looks like you applied a (very sophisticated) Photoshop filter to Google Earth. Everything is a little blurry, and the characteristic sharp edges of handmade pixel art (e.g. [0]) are completely absent. To me, the appeal of pixel art is that each pixel looks deliberately placed, with clever artistic tricks to circumvent the limitations of the medium. For instance, look at th…

Yeah this is all completely fair and I agree with all of it. Aesthetically and philosophically, what AI does for "pixel art" is very off. And once you see the "AI" you can't really unsee it.

But I didn't want to call it a "SimCity" map, though that's really the vibe/inspiration I wanted to capture, because that implies other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even though I knew it'd get a lot of (valid) pushback...

As with all things art, labels are really difficult and the context / meaning / technique is at once completely tied to genre but also completely irrelevant. Think about the label "techno" - the label is deeply meaningful and subtle to some and almost meaningless to others

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#124

Hey, engineer at Oxen.ai here. Glad the fine-tuning worked well for this project! If anyone has questions on that part of it we would be happy to answer. We have a blog post on a similar workflow here: https://www.oxen.ai/blog/how-we-cut-inference-costs-from-46k... On the inference cost and speed: we're actively working on that and have a pretty massive upgrade there coming soon.

Hell yeah oxen.ai is awesome, made my life so much easier

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#126

I was extremely excited until I looked closer and realized how many of these look like ... well AI. The article is such a good read and would recommend people check it out. Feels like something is missing... maybe just a pixelation effect over the actual result? Seems like a lot of the images also lack continuity (something they go over in the article) Overall, such a cool usage of AI that blends Art and AI well.

Yeah it leaves a lot to be desired. Once you see the AI it's hard to unsee. I actually had a few other generation styles, more 8-bit like, that probably would have lended themselves better to actual pixel-art processing, but I opted to use this fine-tune and in for a penny in for a pound, so to speak...

Have you looked at retro Diffusion? https://x.com/RealAstropulse

This person shares lots authentic looking ai generated pixel art. This should give the building more realistic pixel art look.

Edit: example showing small houses https://x.com/RealAstropulse/status/2004195065443549691 Searching for buildings

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#127
I just want to say this isn't just amazing -- it's my new favorite map of NYC.

It's genuinely astonishing how much clearer this is than a traditional satellite map -- how it has just the right amount of complexity. I'm looking at areas I've spent a lot of time in, and getting an even better conceptual understanding of the physical layout than I've ever been able to get from satellite (technically airplane) images. This hits the perfect "sweet spot" of detail with clear "cartoon" coloring.

I see a lot of criticism here that this isn't "pixel art", so maybe there's some better term to use. I don't know what to call this precise style -- it's almost pixel art without the pixels? -- but I love it. Serious congratulations.

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#129
post #19

So, wait: this is just based on taking the 40 best/most consistent Nano Banana outputs for a prompt to do pixel-art versions of isometric map tiles? That's all it takes to finetune Qwen to reliably generate tiles in exactly the same style? Also, does someone have an intuition for how the "masking" process worked here to generate seamless tiles? I sort of grok it but not totally.

Does anyone have a good reference for finetuning Qwen? This article opened my eyes a bit...

Re: Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

#130

I was extremely excited until I looked closer and realized how many of these look like ... well AI. The article is such a good read and would recommend people check it out. Feels like something is missing... maybe just a pixelation effect over the actual result? Seems like a lot of the images also lack continuity (something they go over in the article) Overall, such a cool usage of AI that blends Art and AI well.

Basically, it's not pixel art at all. It's very cool and I don't mind the use of AI at all but I think calling it pixel art is just very misleading. It's closer to a filter but not quite that either.

It's pixel art, just not the types of pixels most people want in pixel art.
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