Anyone remember the Dominance Wars?

redmond_david · Nov 2024

Hi everyone, i'm an old-time polycount user, i've been a 3D modeler since the Milkshape 3D days (Half Life 1) and i've been trying to find the old Dominance War 1 - 3 entires/submissions, as that was when i was pretty big into 3D modelling, which i'm finally getting back into (welding sucks)

Anyone who remembers me, the contest, or even CGCHAT or 3DTotal, it would be awesome to reminisce.

**Edit** My apologies I just realized I may have posted this in the wrong section.

Eric Chadwick · Nov 2024

No worries, welcome back!

OMG DomWar yeah, CGChat wow yeah. I joined Polycount around 2003 or so. When was the first DomWar?

redmond_david · Nov 2024

2006. I have been on waybackmachine, and the finalists lucked out, most of the renders are on there. But as far the other submissions, those are more difficult to lock down. I participated in DW2.

iam717 · Nov 2024

i got a few imgs of them, you could probably find them by name and cubebrush forums kind of tried to take on the torch and made a few also you might've missed out on, not heard about?. https://forums.cubebrush.co/t/cubebrush-art-war/1544 (haven't been there since and seems pretty slow on activity but you can check them out at least.) #general topic movement? no/yes? vote now... you could also try to find each seperated forum that entered and do searches on their sites here is zbrush:https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/dominance-war-5-winners-announced/306235

to give you an idea if you want to grab some imgs, perhaps pinterest also has them somewhere.

redmond_david · Feb 20 2026

iam717 said:

i got a few imgs of them, you could probably find them by name and cubebrush forums kind of tried to take on the torch and made a few also you might've missed out on, not heard about?. https://forums.cubebrush.co/t/cubebrush-art-war/1544 (haven't been there since and seems pretty slow on activity but you can check them out at least.) #general topic movement? no/yes? vote now... you could also try to find each seperated forum that entered and do searches on their sites here is zbrush:https://www.zbrushcentral.com/t/dominance-war-5-winners-announced/306235
to give you an idea if you want to grab some imgs, perhaps pinterest also has them somewhere.

Hey friend, i never thanked you for the legwork ya did. Appreciate it!

iam717 · Feb 20 2026

Yeah, no problem the good ol' days. At least we were there!

Seems people made wall papers of a few of them on sites or something using the images search term:

"dominance war entry winner images".

idk if i saved all of the entries from all of the challenges/contests, though i've run into (recently, 14 days or so ago) HDD issues with them old drives & was going to attempt to get "hdd shells", to take the discs out & replace them into new shells so they "revive", but i am hearing there is an attack vector of "purchasing", on those old HDD's also for some reason... i mean i can speculate why but yeah.. only mention it cause i might not be able to deliver them if that hdd did halt on spinning.

Appreciate the acknowledgement, its good to see community.

redmond_david · Feb 21 2026

I think we don't get to see ours (Puker54 and i worked on it) because it was an entry only, not a winner

iam717 · Feb 27 2026

Heads up: Linked to one of the few some feel should never be "named".

@redmond_david : some people do not appreciate the mentioning of this person anymore since there was controversy around prize situations.

https://www.fredrikhultqvist.com/challenge-comicon-challenge.php

To those that feel some type of way the user requested images only the mentioned user above could possibly have available.

Decided if they did not use all options available to them (since they did not mention the Hoster by name) i provided them the source holders link. (This is not a promotion of/for them)

Hope the link helps, i also tried this search term:

game-artisans.org Dominance war I,II,III,IV,V Entries

https://web.archive.org/web/20220215061155/https://twitter.com/gameartisansorg

https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=images&origin=funnel_home_searchresults&t=ffab&q=https://dominancewar.com/&iax=images

I am going to be done with this thread probably now unless i have the images the user needs which i doubt and have yet to "fix" those HDD issues.

Nice to see ya back though Red, good to see some peeps returning.

Eric Chadwick · Feb 27 2026

Bit rot is a constant problem. Before the Polycount Forum started hosting images, people used all kinds of hosts, and many of those are now dead.

But since we started hosting images, those that people uploaded here are all still "live". I don't remember when we made this change though.

There's a separate problem with http: embeds, which I'm trying to resolve. Any old posts that used http: links to embed images, those no longer work because our forum software now only allows https: embeds. So I'm working with the software designers to patch our old posts, and make them all use https. Since most image providers use the same links, just with https now.

poopipe · Feb 28 2026

I made it to the second bit of dw3 but getting violently teabagged by Bulgarov made me sad enough to not bother doing the main comp for 4.

Good times ..

Alemja · Feb 28 2026

iam717 said:

i got a few imgs of them, you could probably find them by name and cubebrush forums kind of tried to take on the torch and made a few also you might've missed out on, not heard about?. https://forums.cubebrush.co/t/cubebrush-art-war/1544 (haven't been there since and seems pretty slow on activity but you can check them out at least.)

There hasn't been an Art War in several years it seems. The only feedback I had about Art War is I wish they had limits or separate categories, it's not as much of a game art competition. Though you can certainly make game res stuff, it tended to be whatever makes the prettiest render possible. That feedback just might be a me thing though.

Artstation also had some competitions that put out nice stuff and were very promising for a bit, it seems like they have also slowed down the frequency: https://www.artstation.com/challenges

redmond_david · Feb 28 2026

I mean, these competitions we're initially sweet because there were so many... "segregated" 3D Forums for artists to use. I think when Puker54 and i participated in Dominance War we were part of the CGChat (i think?) forums.
This is as close as i get :
https://web.archive.org/web/20070214095734/http://www.gameartisans.org/contests/events/1/team2/view_entries_1_50.html

poopipe · Mar 2 2026

polycount is the only one left i think - 3dtotal is a bookshop now and the others have all just gone.

pior · 1:28AM

If you want to dive back into the spirit of that era you'll get a kick out of the Vertex ebooks, still available to download.

https://ryanhawkins.gumroad.com/

Flipping through them again every now and then over the years it's honestly kind of amazing to see how the internet (and online art communities) have devolved since. At the time of volume 1 the artists all had cool personal websites and were cranking out badass work, free from the worry about "likes", algorithms, and of course blissfully unaware of the upcoming threat of AI plagiarism.

Ryan and everyone involved did such an amazing job with these, incredibly valuable stuff.

redmond_david · 2:22PM

pior said:

If you want to dive back into the spirit of that era you'll get a kick out of the Vertex ebooks, still available to download.

https://ryanhawkins.gumroad.com/

Flipping through them again every now and then over the years it's honestly kind of amazing to see how the internet (and online art communities) have devolved since. At the time of volume 1 the artists all had cool personal websites and were cranking out badass work, free from the worry about "likes", algorithms, and of course blissfully unaware of the upcoming threat of AI plagiarism.

Ryan and everyone involved did such an amazing job with these, incredibly valuable stuff.

Hey thanks for the share.

Pior, I love your style. I still remember that Quake Bunny character you made!

sacboi · 9:59PM

"If you want to dive back into the spirit of that era you'll get a kick out of the Vertex ebooks, still available to download."

Cheers for sharing these are indeed gems, was oscillating between vfx and gamedev at the time so only had issue #1 (cos of that mech on it's cover : ) also in my mind, not unreasonable too suggest really should be mandatory reading/content on every college CG aligned syllabus.

Anyone remember the Dominance Wars?

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