A coastal atlas
A little La Jolla
La Jolla is the cliff above the water, a walk past the Cove, and the light in a third-floor corner of the Design and Innovation Building. I wanted those places to sit together on this site, small enough to turn in your hand.
A place, compressed
The miniature follows a walk through campus and the Cove: Geisel’s concrete supports, the Salk courtyard, DIB, Scripps Pier, wind-shaped Torrey pines, and sea lions on the rocks. The footer continues that walk through a seaside neighborhood. Wider screens reveal Geisel and Salk on one side, and Brockton Villa’s porch, La Valencia’s pink tower, and seals behind the Children’s Pool seawall on the other. DIB connects the two views, with five folded bays and my third-floor office in the middle one.
Their distances are deliberately compressed. The translucent atlas underneath uses real OpenStreetMap coastline and road geometry; the buildings above it are an artistic composition.
For the wider coast, I compared map outlines and aerial views with building plans and photographs. Geisel’s recessed corners, Salk’s angled study towers, and La Valencia’s connected wings each needed their own geometry. Little porch tables, reading benches, and warm windows keep the places feeling lived in.
The selected site theme changes the light and the little activities: a quiet morning, surfing around noon, warm afternoon light, and a small evening bonfire on the footer beach. My DIB office gets a light from noon onward and on some nights. That is a personal vignette, not live occupancy information.
One rider is a tiny nod to Jim Hollan: grey hair, glasses, black clothes, and a red board with a white stripe. The outfit and board are my miniature’s art direction.
From reference to geometry
Open the illustrated process notes to compare the design studies, reconstructed shape, and production miniature.
I started with coordinated generated views, then ran Tencent’s Hunyuan3D-2mv locally to see what shape it could recover. The raw reconstruction is retained alongside the editable Blender composition. It is useful to compare the silhouette with the architecture that needs deliberate modeling: the folded DIB bays, Geisel’s stepped crown, the Salk courtyard, and the thin structure of the pier.
Generated design studies, not photographs or the live browser renderer. The production atlas uses sourced geometry.
The reconstruction recovered the overall coastal mass, but softened the glass bays, library supports, and trees. I kept it as a shape study and built the interactive landmark geometry in Blender. The source images retain their tool provenance: their embedded metadata identifies gpt-image, version 2.0. The image tool did not offer a model selector.
Sources and materials
- Building references: UCSD Design and Innovation Building, Geisel Library architecture, Salk’s architecture guide, and Scripps Pier.
- Village references: Brockton Villa’s history and photographs, La Valencia’s gallery and property plan, and the City of San Diego’s Children’s Pool guide.
- Geographic base: OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License. The exported vector atlas carries the same attribution.
- The hills behind the footer coast: elevation from the USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), U.S. Geological Survey, public domain; house positions on their slopes from map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). The sky over them is physically based, after Sébastien Hillaire’s “A Scalable and Production Ready Sky and Atmosphere Rendering Technique” (EGSR 2020).
- Shape experiment: Tencent Hunyuan3D-2, with its model license retained in the process notes.
- Modeling and rendering: Blender and Three.js.
- Jim Hollan cameo: his UC San Diego portrait guided the small face details. The figure is original procedural geometry; the portrait is not shipped with the site.