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Isopolis renders San Francisco as an isometric pixel-art map

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A Hacker News user going by nuwandavek posted Isopolis, a web app at sf.isopolis.city that renders San Francisco as an interactive isometric pixel-art map in a Ghibli-style aesthetic, complete with ambient music and sound effects and clickable neighborhoods. Rather than working from LIDAR scans, the creator built the map from Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, scraping the data with a tool built using Claude Code and rendering it in three.js. To get the pixel-art look, the creator generated ground-truth training images with Google's Nano Banana image model and then manually curated them for a consistent style, an approach the creator contrasts with an earlier project, isometric.nyc, which the creator says had rejected using 3D building data directly. In HN comments, the creator also acknowledged a known rendering bug: shadows and flat green areas are sometimes misread as water, producing what they call "spurious lakes" in spots such as Buena Vista Park and the Tenderloin, and said a better training data distribution and an improved water detector should fix it; known issues are tracked on a separate dev page. The Show HN post reached 114 points and 32 comments within about four hours of being posted.

Key facts

  • Isopolis (sf.isopolis.city) renders San Francisco as an isometric pixel-art map with a Ghibli-style look, built by HN user nuwandavek.
  • Instead of LIDAR data, the creator used Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles as the source, scraped with a Claude Code-built tool and rendered in three.js.
  • Ground-truth pixel-art training images were generated with Google's Nano Banana image model and then manually curated for a consistent style, a departure from an approach the creator attributes to an earlier project, isometric.nyc.
  • The creator acknowledged a known bug where shadows and flat green areas are sometimes misread as water, producing 'spurious lakes' in places like Buena Vista Park and the Tenderloin.
  • The Show HN post reached 114 points and 32 comments within about four hours.

Why it matters

Isopolis is a small side project, but the build pipeline behind it is the interesting part: a solo developer used Claude Code to write a scraper for Google's photorealistic 3D map tiles, then used Google's Nano Banana image model to generate a set of stylized pixel-art reference images, curated them by hand, and used that as ground truth to turn the raw 3D data into a consistent illustrated map. It is a concrete example of an individual using two different AI tools, a coding agent and an image model, as production infrastructure for a visually ambitious personal project rather than for writing code or prose alone.

Who it affects

Mainly web developers and mapping hobbyists interested in AI-assisted content pipelines, plus San Francisco residents and visitors who might enjoy exploring the city's neighborhoods through the map. It has no direct relevance to enterprise AI buyers or platform decisions.

How to use it

The map is free to visit at sf.isopolis.city. Users can click on neighborhoods for information and browse the city with ambient music and sound effects running in the background. The creator maintains a separate dev.html page documenting known issues, including the map's rendering bugs.

How solid is it

The account of how Isopolis was built comes from the creator's own Show HN post and follow-up comments, not from independent documentation or a written case study, so the technical details (Claude Code scraper, three.js rendering, Nano Banana-generated training images) rest on the creator's word. The post drew a fast, active response on Hacker News: 114 points and 32 comments in roughly four hours, suggesting genuine interest from the HN audience, though that engagement speaks to reception rather than to verifying the technical claims.

Risks and caveats

The creator openly flagged a rendering bug: shadows and flat green areas are sometimes misidentified as water, creating false lakes in parts of the city, and described the fix as still in progress rather than complete. Beyond that, there is no information available about the creator's identity beyond the HN handle nuwandavek, nor about the project's data licensing, hosting costs, or long-term maintenance plans.

“Spurious lakes are an interesting issue I looked into a bit. Two types of cases ended up becoming lakes: shadows, and flat green areas.”

— nuwandavek, Isopolis creator, in a Hacker News comment