Building Isometric Seattle

This week, I built Isometric Seattle: a 3.5-gigapixel illustrated map of my hometown, with live buses and ferries. I tweeted about it and got some decent engagement (for me), so I wanted to take some time to write up how I did it. I’ve been trying to do more ambitious things with AI, especially projects I wouldn’t ordinarily know how to start. I’d seen a few isometric city maps on twitter in the last week, noticed that there wasn’t one for Seattle, and figured I could try and close that gap (I also wanted to channel my innner Fran Lebowitz). This entire project was me driving Claude, but the point of this post is to point out some things I learned about the process so that future projects don’t have to ideate on this from scratch. Nailing the rendering strategy My first attempt combined LiDAR heights with aerial photos to get a grey isometric render of downtown. This gave me a decent city shape (and was free!), but the details were super sparse. Still, I had enough of shape to test…

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