About
Isometric San Francisco is a map of the whole city drawn building by building in an isometric view, the way SimCity drew cities: every street, every house, the hills, the parks, the bridges and the bay. It comes in two styles, an illustrated version and a pixel-art version, and you can switch between them at any spot.
How it was made
The map is not traced from photographs. A 3D model of the city was assembled from public data: building footprints and heights from the City of San Francisco, a LiDAR survey from the US Geological Survey for the terrain, trees and anything the footprints miss, and aerial imagery for roof colours. That model was rendered in 2,400 overlapping frames, and each frame was redrawn by an image model with its neighbours as context, so the pieces join without seams. Automatic checks compared every drawing with the model, and frames that invented or lost buildings were drawn again. Landmarks with regular facades were finished by hand-written code.
It is drawn, not photographed, so it is not a survey: shapes and colours are faithful to the data, details are an artist's guess.
Who
Made by a small independent team. Say hello at hello@isometricsanfrancisco.com.