Hi HN! Showcasing this fun project. I took 1300 square miles of the SF Bay Area from Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and transformed them into a cohesive pixel map. It's really fun to explore and stumble upon various famous landmarks like Apple Park, Palace of Fine Arts, or UC Berkeley.
The technicals involve using Nano Banana 2 to train a Qwen-Image-Edit 2511 LoRA which is used to prototype the style and generation methods. For final map I used Qwen to train a Klein 4B LoRA which reproduced the style at 1/4 of the cost. More details in the blog post.
Let me know what you think! I really enjoyed this process of fine-tuning smaller open source models.
If I did the map with Nano Banana 2 it would have cost around 7k USD!
Credit for the idea goes to Isometric NYC.