SimCity or RealCity?

Yet another surprise source for 3D models has emerged: the game SimCity. SimCity, for those of you who have somehow never encountered it, is a simulation of a city. By tweaking various civic parameters, your city may thrive and grow - or die. It's a great tool for learning some of the basics of city operations. 

 

One of the great things about SimCity is that as your city grows different kinds of buildings appear, just as they might in a real city. Like a city government that merely sets policies, you see only the results of your decisions. If you're successful you'll soon have a big city with lots of interesting buildings. 3D buildings. Hm. 

 

Thingiverse maker Skimbal had the wonderful idea of creating a kit composed of the buildings in SimCity 2000. While it would be terrific to somehow extract the models directly from SimCity, that's not what's going on here. Instead Skimbal simply prepared 3D models of the buildings straight from memory. (Aside: this suggests that Skimbal played SimCity perhaps a bit more than the average gamer?) 

 

He's prepared and uploaded a set of 16+ buildings, roads and other material into a "kit" from which you can quickly assemble a pretty decent replica of your carefully engineered SimCity.

 

Via Thingiverse