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Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF

sf.isopolis.city

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Re: Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF

#51

Post by codetiger »

tda wrote: post #47
codetiger wrote: post #42

This is incredibly beautiful. A few months back I tried to build a my own version of Google Earth rendered in voxels. Basically building from the terrain heightmaps scans available in open public data. Making it smooth and tessellation to work was incredible amount of work even for a simple vexed renderer https://codetiger.in/earth/

Nice, but not sure I agree with your use of voxels. It appears more like pixelated height map, not the use of 3d pixels. From what I see every position on the globe can only have a single elevation

Each pixel is a cube drawn at a certain height based on the terrain height map data. It’s not a volumetric render, I agree.

Re: Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF

#52

Post by sgt »

rob74 wrote: post #46

Nice! But for a city renowned for its steep streets, this looks suspiciously flat :) Ok, you could say it's only a 3D rendering of a 2D map, and it probably has to be this way for practical reasons, to avoid hills obscuring objects behind them, because you can't rotate the map as far as I can see, but not seeing actual height represented in a 3D view still takes some getting used to. Also, there are neighbourhoods an…

It's vibe coded. LLM's have a hard time understanding elevation and isometric display.

Re: Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF

#54

Post by notpushkin »

sgt wrote: post #52
rob74 wrote: post #46

Nice! But for a city renowned for its steep streets, this looks suspiciously flat :) Ok, you could say it's only a 3D rendering of a 2D map, and it probably has to be this way for practical reasons, to avoid hills obscuring objects behind them, because you can't rotate the map as far as I can see, but not seeing actual height represented in a 3D view still takes some getting used to. Also, there are neighbourhoods an…

It's vibe coded. LLM's have a hard time understanding elevation and isometric display.

It’s vibe coded but it’s not slop. There’s a lot of human input here. So either the author overlooked the elevation issue or it was a deliberate decision, but in any case you can’t just pin this on “LLMs don’t understand isometric 3D”.

Re: Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF

#57

Post by RugnirViking »

lawrencechen wrote: post #12

Behind the scenes stuff: 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 > 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 ghib…

interesting with the alcatraz island - I notice its invented some houses, and turned a cruise ship into a rock. I appreciate the difficulty and getting a lora to understand it - despite this the finished project is beautiful

I also feel that some of the technical explanations are a little dense here in the dev blog. I forget who it was who I saw mentioning it here on HN, but I've been having a lot of success with getting models to (re)write technical explanations in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English

Re: Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF

#58

Post by RugnirViking »

rob74 wrote: post #46

Nice! But for a city renowned for its steep streets, this looks suspiciously flat :) Ok, you could say it's only a 3D rendering of a 2D map, and it probably has to be this way for practical reasons, to avoid hills obscuring objects behind them, because you can't rotate the map as far as I can see, but not seeing actual height represented in a 3D view still takes some getting used to. Also, there are neighbourhoods an…

from his dev blog: "All map math happens in a single fixed ... plane... The intended effect was a classic Sim City view of the city. "
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