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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

#131

Post by anonymous908213 »

cannoneyed wrote: post #30
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #3

Appreciate that writeup. Very detailed insights into the process. However those conclusions left me on the fence about whether I 'liked' the project. The conclusions about 'unlocking scale' and commodity content having zero value. Where does that leave you and this project? Does it really matter that much that the project couldn't exist without genAI? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all. As with alot of the areas AI…

At the risk of rehashing the same conversation over and over again, I think this is true of every technology ever. Personally I'm extremely excited about all of the creative domains that this technology unlocks, and also extremely saddened/worried about all of the crafts it makes obsolete (or financially non-viable)...

Do you seriously believe this[1] makes any craft obsolete or financially non-viable?

[1] https://files.catbox.moe/1uphaw.png

This is a fairly cool and novel application of generative AI[2], but it did not generate pixel art and it's still wildly incoherent slop when you examine it closely. This mostly works because it uses scale to obfuscate the flaws; users are expected to be zoomed out and not looking at the details. But the details are what makes art work. You could not sell a game or an animation like this. This is not replacing anybody.

[2] It's also wholly unrepresentative of general use-cases. 99.99999999% of generative AI usage does not involve a ton of manual engineering labour fine-tuning a model and doing the things you did to get this set up. Even with all of that effort, what you've produced here is never replacing a commercially viable pixel artist. The rest of the world slapping a prompt into an online generator is even further away from doing that.

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

#132

Post by cannoneyed »

crazygringo wrote: post #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. Th…

Author here, and to reiterate another reply - all of the critique of "pixel art" is completely fair. 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 a lot of other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even though I figured it might get a lot of (valid) pushback...

In general, labels and genres are really hard - "techno" to a deep head in Berlin is very different than "techno" to my cousins. This issue has always been fraught, because context and meaning and technique are all tangled up in these labels which are so important to some but so easily ignored by others. And those questions are even harder in the age of AI where the machine just gobbles up everything.

But regardless, it was a fun project! And to me at least it's better to just make cool ambitious things in good faith and understand that art by definition is meaningful and therefore makes people feel things from love to anger to disgust to fascination.

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

#133

Post by cannoneyed »

smusamashah wrote: post #126
cannoneyed wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yup, I'm a big fan. They'd be the first to admit that making true pixel art is very hard, and getting the AI to do it even somewhat consistently requires a lot of tuning and guardrails / processing.

At some point I couldn't fiddle with the style / pipeline anymore and just had to roll with "looks ok to me" - the whole point of the project wasn't to faithfully adhere to a style but to push the limits of new technology and learn a lot along the way

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

#134

Post by vagabund »

Really fun to fly around, find my old apartment building etc.

It would be neat if you could drag and click to select an area to inpaint. Let's see everyone's new Penn Station designs!

Would guess it'd have to be BYOK but it works pretty well:

https://i.imgur.com/EmbzThl.jpeg

Much better than trying to inpaint directly on Google Earth data

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

#135

Post by ant6n »

cannoneyed wrote: post #132
crazygringo wrote: post #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. Th…

Author here, and to reiterate another reply - all of the critique of "pixel art" is completely fair. 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 a lot of other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even th…

It’s almost like sim city (2000), but not quite. It night help if the overall mayo was fully square.

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

#136

Post by cannoneyed »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #118
potatowaffle wrote: post #67

> What’s possible now that was impossible before? > I spent a decade as an electronic musician, spending literally thousands of hours dragging little boxes around on a screen. So much of creative work is defined by this kind of tedious grind. ... This isn't creative. It's just a slog. Every creative field - animation, video, software - is full of these tedious tasks. Of course, there’s a case to be made that the very…

That quote seriously rubs me the wrong way. "Dragging little boxes around" in a DAW is creative, it constitutes the entire process of composing electronic music. You are notating what notes to play, when and for how long they play, what instrument plays them, and any modifications to the default sound of that instrument. Is writing sheet music tedious? Sure, it can be, when the speed of notating by hand can't keep up…

I'd say that deciding where a transient should go" is creative, manually aligning 15 other tracks over and over again is not (not to mention having to do it in both the DAW and melodyne)...

I agree that "push button get image" AI generation is at best a bit cheap, at worst deeply boring. Art is resistance in a medium - but at what point is that resistance just masochism?

George Perec took this idea to the max when he wrote an entire novel without the letter "E" - in French! And then someone had the audacity to translate it to English (e excluded)! Would I ever want to do that? Hell no, but I'm very glad to live in a world where someone else is crazy enough to.

I've spent my 10,000 hours making "real" art and don't really feel the need to justify myself - but to all of the young people out there who are afraid to play with something new because some grumps on hacker news might get upset:

It doesn't matter what you make or how you make it. What matters is why you make it and what you have to say.

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

#137

Post by cannoneyed »

weinzierl wrote: post #69

Probably the best pre-AI take of the isometric pixel art NYC is poster from the art collective eboy. In the early 2000s their art was featured in MoMA (but I don't remember the NYC poster specifically). https://www.eboy.com/products/new-york-colouring-poster

This is so good, just ordered one!

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

#138

Post by dimitri-vs »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #129
tptacek wrote: 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...

The turn-key option is ostris ai-toolkit which has good tutorials on YT and can be run completely locally or via RunPod. Claude Code can set everything up for you (speaking from experience) and can even SSH into RunPod.

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

#140

Post by jesse__ »

pimlottc wrote: post #120
jesse__ wrote: post #13

> Slop vs. Art > If you can push a button and get content, then that content is a commodity. Its value is next to zero. > Counterintuitively, that’s my biggest reason to be optimistic about AI and creativity. When hard parts become easy, the differentiator becomes love. Love that. I've been struggling to succinctly put that feeling into words, bravo.

Where’s the love here? There are artists who dedicate their lives to creating a single masterwork. This is someone spending a weekend on a “neat idea”.

You're inferring that time invested per project is directly proportional to love for the craft, which I disagree with strongly. Taking a weekend to explore a new medium is an act of interest/love in the craft. Is Robert Bateman any less dedicated to a life of art than Michelangelo was? Maybe, maybe not, but I think we can both agree they produced quick sketches, and dedicated their lives to producing incredible art.

I expect artists will experiment with the new tools and produce incredibly creative works with them, far beyond the quality I can produce by typing in "a pelican riding a bicycle".

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