Photograph the town from one fixed angle
Google's photorealistic 3D model of State College, rendered through a single camera looking north at 30°. Every pixel is 15 cm of ground.
300 renders · 2048 px eachHow this was made
A real town, drawn like a 90s city builder
Every building, tree and street is where it really is. Drag across the picture to see the 3D scan underneath.
3D scanThe map<>
Old Main and the Allen Street end of downtown
01scan
02teach
Show an artist a few hundred examples
GPT Image redrew 200 small crops in a pixel-art city-builder style, each in a different season or time of day.
195 kept after a check by eye
03learn
Train a model to draw the same way
Those examples taught a small add-on for the open Qwen image-editing model, on one GPU in about an hour and a half.
1,500 training steps
04paint
Paint the whole town in one go
The trained model painted the entire map as one seamless picture, with seven GPUs each taking a season or time of day.
about 2 hours per theme
Seven ways to see it
The map follows the clock: golden hour around sunset, lamplight after dark, snow in winter.
9×6 kmof town and countryside
1.26 Gpxper theme
7seasons and times of day
$140roughly, of computing start to finish
Credits
Style teacher & logoOpenAI GPT Image
TypeBungee by David Jonathan Ross