Recreate Market Street, San Francisco as it stood on April 17, 1906, the afternoon before the earthquake, in Blender. Scope: the Ferry Building up Market to Fifth Street, including the Palace Hotel, the Call Building, the Chronicle Building, Lotta's Fountain and the Emporium. Before modeling anything, build a source file from: the 1899-1905 Sanborn fire insurance maps (footprints, heights, materials, occupants), the Miles Brothers film "A Trip Down Market Street" (April 1906), period photographs from OpenSFHistory, the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey collection, and USGS topography. Record every building with footprint, height, facade material, occupant, and the source for each fact with a confidence level. Build everything in Blender Python. No downloaded meshes, textures or HDRIs. Write reusable generators (Victorian commercial facade, mansard roof, bay windows, awnings, painted signage, gas and electric street lamps, cable car, horse-drawn wagon, early automobile) and assemble the street from the source file, so every building traces back to data. Provide a 10 second video up the street.
Make it yours. Change the place and date in the first line and the landmarks after "Scope:", then list sources for your own period in place of the Sanborn maps and "A Trip Down Market Street". Keep "No downloaded meshes, textures or HDRIs" and the rule that every building traces back to data.
Market Street in 1906, rebuilt in 3D
A short camera move up San Francisco's Market Street on the afternoon before the 1906 earthquake. Claude Opus 5.5 built it in Blender from one prompt, working from a sourced building file of old maps, film and photos, with no downloaded models.
“Its better 3D modeling and vision mean you can build an entire world from a single prompt.”
- Claude Tag
- Claude Opus 5.5
- Blender
- One-shot
You'll need
- Blender, with an agent that can run Blender Python scripts
- Web access for the historical sources
How it was made
The creator gave the prompt in Claude Tag, Anthropic's Claude in Slack. The prompt asks for a sourced data file before any modeling, reusable generators for facades, roofs, lamps and vehicles, and no downloaded meshes, textures or HDRIs, so that every building traces back to data. It asks for a 10-second video; the posted clip is 8 seconds at 960x680.
Posted Sep 22, 2026 · X · 1.1k likes · 157k views · 96 comments
Prompt from: reply on X
Look notesby Reference
A black-and-white street-level view down Market Street's cable-car tracks toward a clock tower at the far end, between rows of three- and four-storey brick commercial blocks with awnings and painted wall signs, horse-drawn wagons and people on foot.
- Color
- Monochrome grays like period film, in soft daylight with fine grain and dust specks.
- Type
- No titles. The painted signs on the building walls are soft and mostly illegible.
- Framing
- One-point perspective from the middle of the tracks: the rails converge on the clock tower at the vanishing point, with buildings lining both sides and a box wagon in the right foreground.
- Structure
- One continuous street view: across the nine frames the nearer buildings at the edges change, while the clock tower stays at the vanishing point and wagons and pedestrians shift along the road.
