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Comment by lawrencechen

19 hours ago

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 <30mins exploring this and stuck to google 3d images. Claude Code whipped up a scraper to stream the 3D Tiles and render with three.js. This gives the best "real" texture base for the model to learn from. Anything else would involve a LOT of manual work to get the inputs right.

> 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 ghibli-style pixel-art images using Google's Nano Banana. SF terrain is very interesting. There are quite a few distinct features like skyscrapers in FiDi, the hills in the southeast, 2 iconic bridges, lots of coastline, piers, parks, suburban grids and lots of water. I generated a ton of images and curated from them. Getting consistent style was a challenge. There was a LOT of manual trial and error. But as usual, Claude Code added this feature to the dev app that allowed me to select the best images and approve them.

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lawrencechen

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RugnirViking  10 hours ago

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

nuwandavek  17 hours ago

glad you liked it!

I had to leave out a ton of details in the training process. But at every step, codex/cc built me a dev tool to navigate the complexity. That was such a unique side project experience.