I'm building a paper SimCity 4

[Ura 223]

Hello everyone!
I really love the game SimCity 4 — about 10 years ago, I even recreated it in paper form. Now I’m back to doing it again. I’ve been chatting with a friend who also loves this game, and he recommended that I join this wonderful platform to share my work and get inspired by buildings and ideas from other people. So I decided to go for it! 

Yes, unfortunately, there is a war in our country. Due to health reasons, I can’t move around much, so I mostly stay at home. BUT! That doesn’t stop me from working with my hands and using my mind!  Right now, my son and I are making paper models together and having a great time!

So, hi to all! I’d love to share my paper models. 
I’m new here, and after checking out some of your posts — I’m absolutely amazed! You guys are incredible. So many ideas, and so many of them already brought to life. In a nearby thread, one member creates everything in 3D — I’m blown away. I have a collection of over 300 unique paper building templates.

I’ll be very happy to share my work in paper modeling with you. I’ve gathered A LOT over the years. But all in good time. I’d also be grateful if you have any textures of finished buildings and are willing to share them.

Thank you, @bhmantan for telling me about this site! Big thanks to the administrator @CorinaMarie and everyone who supports this platform — that’s truly inspiring as well! Thank you all so much!

P.S. Please also forgive any mistakes or inaccuracies in my words — English is not my native language.

[Ura 223]

These photos are over 10 years old. This was the very beginning of my journey.
I was deeply inspired by the game. Of course, I no longer have those buildings — they’ve been gone for a long time
I'm sure many of you will recognize some of the buildings from the game in these photos.

[nos.17 5,120]

This is really cool! Thank you for sharing! 

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

@Ura

Very cool. I'd never have come up with this idea on my own. It's brilliant and looks great!

Btw, I added a clickable linky to your original post (over in the Introduction thread) so that might send a few more peeps here to this topic.

[Cyclone Boom 16,875]

@CorinaMarie just let me know about this, so I figured to pop in and comment...

This is such superb work! The detail is outstanding, and I admire the effort you've put into this project. It's super cool to see such creativity, how you're bringing the SC4 buildings to life in paper model form. Thanks for sharing a sample of your work, and we look forward to seeing any of your continued progress.

And welcome to Simtropolis. It's great to have you part of the community.

(Note: To also help with visibility, I added the Featured to your topic.)

[bhmantan 2,045]

Woah... this is amazing, and welcome to Simtropolis!
This looks like a lifetime project that took and will take a lot of time & dedication. I admire that!
And it's nice seeing all those buildings, it's like you're playing SC4 in real life lol

Maybe once you're done with vanilla buildings, you can start with custom buildings and, if possible, make some cars and trees too lol
There are tons of them here for your reference, you'll never run out of things to be made.

Also, a suggestion, there's a link to submit a feature at the Home navbar of this site.
Just use one of your pictures and give it a try, so you can have a banner that links to this thread.

Awesome work!
Would love to see more of this and your city growing as you continue

[Fox 1,444]

So many memories looking at those old familiar models..

 

Getting the popcorn to sit back and watch you create something that is going to be amazing!

[paulmc 391]

Superb ! Outstanding work, definitely recognizable buildings, and with the advantage of being free of crash-to-desktop, lol. Keep pushing ! Looking forward to see it expand as you add new models.

[PixelPerfect 551]

On 2025-05-24 at 9:48 AM, Ura said:

I’ll be very happy to share my work in paper modeling with you. I’ve gathered A LOT over the years. But all in good time. I’d also be grateful if you have any textures of finished buildings and are willing to share them.

This is such a charming project! I love how you print everything in colour and craft the building lots by hand. I'd love to know some of the stories behind your work  Please keep us updated on how this progresses!

[kschmidt 6,164]

That's awesome, except maxis models indeed creators sharing their models is great with eve ry entry ! Unfortunate nothing ex is today, war such awfully thing !

Sincerely yours,

Kschmidt

[kSlank 146]

So cool!

[philforhockey51 4,211]

I'm glad I came across this, it's great to see another layer of creativity related to the game. Thank you for sharing, please share more when you can. Welcome to the community

Slava Ukrayini

[Ura 223]

Hi! Thank you all so much for the feedback — I really enjoy reading your posts.

It took me a few days to explore the forum, reflect, download, and install various plugins for the game. I even had to reinstall the game several times. Eventually, I more or less figured out how to extract textures from both the game and the add-ons. This will come in handy for the future Huge respect to the folks who make the models — you’re awesome!
My son wanted to see all of this in the form of paper models so badly that I actually started feeling a bit overwhelmed =)

Anyway, let’s go in order!

I used to be a designer in the printing industry for many years. I work well in Photoshop, vector programs, and of course neural networks like Midjourney. So creating buildings, designing locations, etc. — it’s not a problem for me at all. The only problem is not taking on too much and doing only as much as I can — with pleasure!

So I compromised with my son. We decided our city would be 6x6 A4 sheets in size. Honestly, that’s already quite a lot But I agreed.

=============================================================
A bit of theory and the foundation we laid down.

First: the universal unit of measurement is the “sector” — its size is 22x22 mm. Based on this, the whole city was supposed to be built (until I ran into one issue, which I’ll describe later).

Second — very important: the height of one floor is 5 mm. Yes, I know there will be inaccuracies, that’s unavoidable. But we needed some kind of baseline. So we set this as our starting point!

Third: any building can be moved and relocated! That is, we’re not gluing buildings to the city map permanently. We can always redesign the city as we like from the elements we have.

The first thing we needed to do was create the city map.

I got lucky. A programmer friend of mine made a map editor for me a long time ago specifically for printing layouts under buildings. He’s also a fan of the game, so he approached it very seriously! The only catch is — he made it 8 years ago, and we barely found a backup in the archives.

Here’s what the editor looks like inside. It has layers: roads, background fills (fields, parking lots, etc. for aesthetics), trams, railroads, bridges, and decorations like cars and more.

This is how the city planning looked initially.

And this is how it looked after a few days.

Next step: a test print and fitting. And thank goodness I did it. Here's what I discovered:

1. The map needs to be extended in width and height for printing, because everything’s too tight and overlapping the roads.

2. Everything is way too dark.

After playing around with color correction and tweaking the settings on my inkjet printer, I got the result I wanted. Yes, I also have a laser printer — it prints brighter and doesn’t wash off — BUT… the toner wipes off easily with fingers!! And that’s a huge downside. The laser printer’s powder smudges easily. The inkjet soaks into the paper, so it doesn’t wipe off.

Anyway, here’s the result:

And then I had an important idea. My son and I were constantly annoyed that the buildings would move whenever we accidentally bumped the sheet with the roads. It was honestly very frustrating.

So we came up with a solution — we’ll make the roads separately on corrugated cardboard. This is what the road looks like by itself. To avoid wasting paper, I also drew sector bases for future buildings.

Now all that’s left is to assemble everything! But that’s a story for later. I’ve already made you read too much!

In any case, the city map is done and we’ll print it all out. Then we’ll assemble it, and later we’ll find a suitable space where we can begin building the city. Thanks to everyone — stay in touch!

To be continued..

[hugues aroux 3,784]

This is really great! In the digital age, giving "substance" back to our games! As PixelPerfect's project, I love it! I applaud the thinking, the work, the know-how, the tips to implement, and the sharing with your son. A modular 3D city in the middle of the living room, isn't that great!? (huhu.. I recognize some textures! ).

[Ura 223]

3 hours ago, hugues aroux said:

This is really great! In the digital age, giving "substance" back to our games! As PixelPerfect's project, I love it! I applaud the thinking, the work, the know-how, the tips to implement, and the sharing with your son. A modular 3D city in the middle of the living room, isn't that great!? (huhu.. I recognize some textures! ).

Thank you
About the textures: I’ve decided that even though I have a lot of my own graphic materials, I still want to include something from the members of this community in my city That’s just awesome! A little house, a landscape element, a road. In this case, your textures are really great! I couldn’t resist using them right away :). Thank you for creating them!

[xnight34 56]

There is little for me to say that is a worthy response to what you've delivered here today, Ura, however...

1: This is beautiful and love of the art in its purest form.

2: I hope you succeed in driving the orcs from your lands, my friend.

[Fox 1,444]

So fascinating .. I found myself glued to the screen reading and re-reading your post to digest every detail... I'm hooked!!

 

I can't wait for the next installment!

 

[Zeratai 83]

Insane work

[Ura 223]

Hello everyone! We continue building the city. We’ve experienced an evolution of consciousness in our approach to creating building models—and it’s really true! But more on that in a moment.

What has been accomplished during this period:

1. One of my personal goals is for everything to be compact and interchangeable. I even want to make the city map like a construction kit that you can assemble and place on a shelf, without taking up much space. After thinking it over, we found a solution! Our city map consists of 9 sections, each made up of 4 A4 sheets.
I created a small cardboard prototype to understand how I could stack and unstack them compactly.

Next, I prepared the roads: I cut cardboard, glued it to the road pieces, and then fixed them to the map. This ensures our little houses don’t shift but stay firmly in place.

Then came the most important and enjoyable moment—assembling a complete section of the map. And it worked perfectly!

We still need to make 8 more sections in the same way, but that will come later.

2 We’ve radically changed our attitude and philosophy toward making the houses.

My son and I noticed we were building houses at random—just whichever one we liked at the moment, regardless of style, number of floors, or complexity. But that was NOT RIGHT!
We realized we weren’t fully developing the STYLE and DESIGN of each structure. For example, my son showed me which houses he wanted to make—these are cyberpunk references:

This is the future.

This is a contemporary style… and many more.

But making one house at a time is silly—we don’t immerse ourselves in the atmosphere of that style or design. So we decided to tackle each style fully: if we decide to do everything related to cyberpunk, we stick with it until it’s complete. And it paid off.
We developed a set dedicated to the years 1930–1950—guess what? It was awesome! Efficient and VERY engaging. We truly enjoyed the process.

We also discovered that, thanks to Midjourney, we can generate many textures for the same building forms. So we decided to create three textures for each form.

As for the forms themselves, there are many—but creating every possible form for a single style doesn’t make sense. It’s better to produce forms gradually across different architectural and historical styles.

And there’s one more piece of good news:

We built a dedicated space where we’ll assemble the entire city! It was challenging… but we did it.

Let’s enjoy the result we’ve achieved, even if it’s small:

Thank you all so much!
Stay tuned, and to be continued…

[Ura 223]

Hello everyone, friends. I don’t know about you, but this week has been a bit tough for me 😊. Maybe it’s because I got extra tasks and requirements for building the houses — but let’s go step by step!

We realized that it’s about time to start adding industry to our city — after all, people need somewhere to produce goods and products And that turned out to be a ridiculously tricky question...

The thing is, we had absolutely nothing for factories. No textures, no sector bases, not even solid ideas. And even industry comes in different types! The first thing I did was check the section of this forum where members shared screenshots of their factories, ports, and other industrial areas. That helped a lot!

I'll try not to get too detailed, but in the end we settled on heavy industry — we wanted factories with pipes!
My son generated references for factories in MidJourney, so we had something to start from.

Next, I tried to sketch some 3D shapes for potential factory buildings — more like industrial structures.

Then I designed and printed a sketch version. No textures — just to test if I could assemble it and whether everything was accounted for. I only do this when buildings are particularly complex.

But everything worked! The building came together well. So I moved on to working on textures, which I put together in Photoshop.

Then I had to design the pipes and the baseplates, which took almost the whole day.

In the end, we had in our hands:

1. Printed factory models

2. Printed factory pipes

3. Industrial sector baseplates

And as if that wasn’t enough (honestly, I was already getting a bit tired by that point), my son goes: “Let’s record everything on video, and I’ll learn video editing and publish how we build the houses on YouTube...”
But I played it smart. I said, “Okay, but I won’t be in charge of that. If you want to — do it. If not — don’t.” And that’s how we agreed.

4. I now have to remember to turn on the webcam when I’m building — we decided that my hands should be visible in the frame.

I understand that filming a video is not the same as having it ready to publish, so deep down I hope he either won’t have time for it or gets bored of the video thing.
But then my friend, a programmer, showed up. He’s totally amazed by what we’re doing (he’s also a fan of SimCity4) and said: “I’ll make a website where people can download your building plans for free.”
At that point, I honestly started losing enthusiasm for building paper houses 😅 Because I’m not really a high-energy person, and I was just too lazy to deal with all that.
But my friend said he would handle everything — Photoshop, uploading, etc. All I needed to do was send him the files... So OK.

5. Don’t forget to send source files to my programmer friend so he can make some kind of site I don’t fully understand 😊

That’s it for now. I’m kind of mentally exhausted... but I switched to assembling factories — and that was cool.
A bit tricky at times, but I enjoyed it.

First, I made a whole bunch of future factory pipes using ink tube casings from pens of different diameters.

Then I prepared all the baseplates. To be honest, I ended up changing the layout of the factory buildings from my original plan.

Then I cut everything out and started gluing it together.

Overall, it turned out quite fun… BUT IT TOOK A LONG TIME!!! Regular houses are much quicker to build.
Designing something from scratch is definitely a serious challenge.
But we managed. My son built the simpler ones, and I took on the more complex ones.

At the moment, this is how many we’ve built so far:

Now let’s enjoy the final look 😊

Right now I’m planning to make some small organizers or boxes to store all the little parts — there are a lot of them, and everything’s kind of scattered...
I also want to make around 6 more heavy industry factories and then switch to a new theme.

But the city is growing! And it’s going to be awesome.
I already like how it’s turning out.
Thanks for your attention. To be continued...

[hugues aroux 3,784]

Wow !What a job well done... These little factories are superb! Impressive!

[xnight34 56]

3 hours ago, Ura said:

Because I’m not really a high-energy person, and I was just too lazy to deal with all that.

We're simpatico, you and I.

[kschmidt 6,164]

Except buildings some parks with paper tree, gszebo, ponds and fountain or a  church, townhall and graveyard ?Those industrial great for powerplants , highways, harbour or airport still s step to far  ! Minecraft got a paper version any other game translated to paper?

Sincerely yours,

Kdchmidt

[Ura 223]

8 minutes ago, kschmidt said:

Except buildings some parks with paper tree, gszebo, ponds and fountain or a  church, townhall and graveyard ?Those industrial great for powerplants , highways, harbour or airport still s step to far  ! Minecraft got a paper version any other game translated to paper?

Sincerely yours,

Kdchmidt

Hi there! For now, we’re making everything in batches without focusing on specific types of buildings like fire stations or police departments. We'll get to those eventually. As for parks and greenery in general — we don’t really have any solid ideas yet, except maybe printing everything with a 3D printer... The scale is so small that it’s hard to manage without some creative workarounds.

I’ve actually put together a whole list of industrial models we might make in the future, but honestly, we just go with the flow and enthusiasm If I feel like making or designing a certain building now — I just do it. Personally, I want to keep working on factories. Create some tanks, big manufacturing buildings — kind of wrap up that part. After that, we’re thinking about switching to farmland and the agricultural sector (but no promises ).

As for other games being turned into paper — I don’t really know. The only thing I enjoy is making little houses, and it’s a lot of fun. SimCity was a huge inspiration — such a great game!

[monicadm 40]

such amazing work!

[Ura 223]

Hello everyone! It's been a while since I last posted — I’ve been busy, but I’ve gathered a lot of material.

As I’ve mentioned before, my son and I are building a paper megacity inspired by the game SimCity 4. As expected, my son didn’t have the patience to keep making videos, but I still diligently document everything I do by hand — maybe it’ll come in handy someday.

Overall, we’re very satisfied with how the industrial zones turned out. You could say we’ve had our fun with them We’ve even started creating cluster-style factories — not just single monolithic buildings, but modular parts that can be rearranged however you like. And honestly, that’s a pretty cool concept!

As expected, my programmer friend didn’t have enough time to properly build a website, but he suggested listing some small sets on Etsy and selling them. Well... why not? We have a lot of them anyway. We created a couple of sets and listed them. There haven’t been many sales, but I’m not really upset — I don’t mind either way If it works — great. If not — so what? Is that going to stop my son and me from enjoying building houses and creating our city? No way... We’ll keep going. We have SO MANY IDEAS!!!

Sorry, I got sidetracked... In the meantime, my son made some organizers for all the tiny parts — they used to be scattered everywhere and caused a mess.

But enough talking — let me show you some photos of what we’ve made:

Next up, we want to create houses in a green, eco-style — with green roofs, balconies, and such. We’re also planning to make some small one- or two-story houses with little green spaces and flowers, since everything looks a bit gloomy without them.

Thanks for your attention! To be continued...

[CorinaMarie 29,605]

1 hour ago, Ura said:

Overall, we’re very satisfied with how the industrial zones turned out.

Beautiful! You are doing amazing work.  

[pikirdong 3]

Keren sekali, Bro.