Advance Wars By Web 3D Playback Tool
This project started as an entry to a competition on the Polycount game art forum back in 2013. The goal of the competition was to create a 3D diorama of a video game of the artist’s choosing where all the assets were extremely low-fidelity. I chose Advance Wars: Dual Strike, as it’s always been a favorite of mine and I’ve always thought it would be amazing to see a 3D rendition of it (keep in mind this was about a decade before the release of Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp). Years later I was contacted by someone from the Advance Wars By Web community with the idea of creating a tool that would allow players to watch their games replayed, in 3D, in a web browser. Since then I’ve been tweaking my old assets and creating new ones to fill in the units and terrain I hadn’t completed. All units are under 1000 triangles each with 128×128 pixel textures. The terrain tiles, buildings, and props are even lower fidelity. This has been an extremely fun project to work on and an excellent exercise in interpreting pixel art in 3D, and how/where to cut corners.
The original entry for the Polycount "VG Remix" competition. My diorama took 7th place out of over 600 submissions.
A more zoomed-in view of the Polycount competition entry.
A collection of the army units completed so far, including models from the Polycount competition as well as new ones that have been added recently.
The textured Megatank unit.
The textured Rocket unit.
How the models look untextured. Each unit is extremely low-poly.
The terrain tiles and props created so far. A lot of the terrain tiles have been given a major overhaul since the Polycount competition versions.
A test map used for seeing how the tiles and props are looking together.
The various modular assets that make up pipes in the game.
An example demonstrating how the modular pipe assets can be combined to create pipes.