It is incorrect to name this pixelart. Perhaps diffusion-art. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it "slopart"—that would be derogatory.
First, it has very little in common with the process of creation of actual pixelart imagery, as all here on the map is blurred, no pixels are clearly distinguishable.
Second of all, pixelart is something ppl intent-fully create one layer at a time, very often - one pixel a time. Is akin to as embroidery (which pixelart very much resembles), and embroidery is not the same as textile produced by a Jacquard Loom. And the whole point of embroidery is to do it like this in order to achieve the result, not that you cannot do whatever you want with machine textile, and not that we don't wear it daily, because it was programmed and done by machine.
Present map is perhaps the third similar attempt at something... which has its value, but should be regarded the same as perhaps taking Pink Floyd's lyrics and progressions recreated in Suno... or rather training a model to play like Pink Floyd and then call a diffusion product psychedelic rock.
As s.o. who is both super-fan of pixel-art (such as https://x.com/84Aleha/status/2038268570094723313, though I can take isometric stuff also, that is fine), and diffusion imagery (I actually did some poster designs with it, not many), I feel the need to express my disagreement and overall confusion reg if this is an actual pixelart. To me - it is not,.
As someone who's only familiar with Valencia on Google Maps, I found the default orientation very confusing. Is it possible to configure it so that north always points upwards?
My last visit to valencia (as a tourist) was a long time ago (20 yeyrs) but i just had some minutes of fun playing your two tourist games :-) thanks for showing !!
> An image model trained on a hand-picked pixel-art style then repaints it, tile by tile, each tile continuing its painted neighbours so the city stays seamless.
Nice work. The developer of Isometric NYC did something similar - creating a fine-tune of the Qwen Image Edit model. I'd be curious to hear more detail about the image model you used. (the base checkpoint, LoRAs, etc).
> A few months ago I was standing on the 13th floor balcony of the Google New York 9th St office staring out at Lower Manhattan. I’d been deep in the weeds of a secret project using Nano Banana and Veo and was thinking deeply about what these new models mean for the future of creativity.
[Proceeds to generate a whole bunch of same-old-shit with LLMs.]
I guess the conclusion is that creativity is dead.
The streetcar tracks fade out in places and I don't see any streetcars. And I can't see my narrow medieval street from this angle. But overall very impressive.
Hey I'm from Valencia! This is pretty nice render of the city, thanks for sharing. I liked the mini game as well. Would've loved to see some other angles of some places though!
That is a quite a nice way to explore a city, a middle ground between regular maps (too abstract, no sense of height) and detailed/realistic street view.
Dense development right up to farmland. Something you will never see in a US city. Not surprising that Valencia is 4x as dense as Atlanta even though Atlanta is 5x more population.
It is incorrect to name this pixelart. Perhaps diffusion-art. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it "slopart"—that would be derogatory.
First, it has very little in common with the process of creation of actual pixelart imagery, as all here on the map is blurred, no pixels are clearly distinguishable.
Second of all, pixelart is something ppl intent-fully create one layer at a time, very often - one pixel a time. Is akin to as embroidery (which pixelart very much resembles), and embroidery is not the same as textile produced by a Jacquard Loom. And the whole point of embroidery is to do it like this in order to achieve the result, not that you cannot do whatever you want with machine textile, and not that we don't wear it daily, because it was programmed and done by machine.
Present map is perhaps the third similar attempt at something... which has its value, but should be regarded the same as perhaps taking Pink Floyd's lyrics and progressions recreated in Suno... or rather training a model to play like Pink Floyd and then call a diffusion product psychedelic rock.
As s.o. who is both super-fan of pixel-art (such as https://x.com/84Aleha/status/2038268570094723313, though I can take isometric stuff also, that is fine), and diffusion imagery (I actually did some poster designs with it, not many), I feel the need to express my disagreement and overall confusion reg if this is an actual pixelart. To me - it is not,.
Idk, it looks like better pixel art than most stuff I've seen. I'm a big fan and enjoy the website and think they did a really great job.
As someone who's only familiar with Valencia on Google Maps, I found the default orientation very confusing. Is it possible to configure it so that north always points upwards?
Spanish cities by seaside have a pattern of putting the sea on the "south", even when it's not there.
On it. It will take some hours but it will be done.
As someone from Valencia, currently in Valencia: same! Hehe
OP great work, I love it.
My last visit to valencia (as a tourist) was a long time ago (20 yeyrs) but i just had some minutes of fun playing your two tourist games :-) thanks for showing !!
> An image model trained on a hand-picked pixel-art style then repaints it, tile by tile, each tile continuing its painted neighbours so the city stays seamless.
Nice work. The developer of Isometric NYC did something similar - creating a fine-tune of the Qwen Image Edit model. I'd be curious to hear more detail about the image model you used. (the base checkpoint, LoRAs, etc).
This is super nice! It would be very interesting to share some details on how it was made. Good job!
So cool. Very curious what tools you used for making this!
Not OP but the person who did the NYC isometric map has a pretty detailed breakdown of their process.
https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
> A few months ago I was standing on the 13th floor balcony of the Google New York 9th St office staring out at Lower Manhattan. I’d been deep in the weeds of a secret project using Nano Banana and Veo and was thinking deeply about what these new models mean for the future of creativity.
[Proceeds to generate a whole bunch of same-old-shit with LLMs.]
I guess the conclusion is that creativity is dead.
The streetcar tracks fade out in places and I don't see any streetcars. And I can't see my narrow medieval street from this angle. But overall very impressive.
Hey I'm from Valencia! This is pretty nice render of the city, thanks for sharing. I liked the mini game as well. Would've loved to see some other angles of some places though!
I saw a couple of these on Twitter in the last 24 hours
But this one is particularly detailed, very nice!
I'm sure it wasn't the first, but the one that got a lot of traction was from about nine months ago - the isometric view of New York City.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46721802
https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc
That is a quite a nice way to explore a city, a middle ground between regular maps (too abstract, no sense of height) and detailed/realistic street view.
Missing some tents in Plaça de l'Ajuntament :)
Ohhhh very nice.
We should figure out a good game to play with it. Like adding transport infrastructure or you need to achieve X time reduction in commuting times.
Nice!
Love it. I was just living in Valencia for the summer. But I still did horribly on the landmark-guessing game.
Dense development right up to farmland. Something you will never see in a US city. Not surprising that Valencia is 4x as dense as Atlanta even though Atlanta is 5x more population.
https://tinyvalencia.com/?lat=39.498684&lng=-0.384359&zoom=1...
cool! i wonder if there's a collection of all these isometric city projects
It's a good thing there was no Spanish Robert Moses...
Breath-taking! Well done!