World of Tanks Modern Armor ships across four platforms, supports over 900 vehicles in World War II mode, and more than 200 in Cold War mode. With continuous new releases and content, keeping that catalog performant without drowning the art team in manual geometry work is a heavy production challenge. InstaLOD is how Wargaming solves it.
The Cost of Seeing Every Tank on the Map
Cold War mode introduced True Vision, a system that keeps every vehicle visible across the entire map at all times. It is a compelling gameplay feature, but also introduces a serious rendering problem.
“Manually creating three to four Level of Detail steps for every Cold War tank is a major bottleneck.” — Fracella Chavez, Lead Vehicle Artist.
Chavez estimates that generating LODs for a single tank could, without assistance, take hours or even days depending on complexity. Across a roster of thousands of vehicles with new content shipping on a continuous schedule, that compounds into years of cumulative artist time spent on mechanical, repeatable work. Hiring more artists is an option, but it raises costs, compounds inconsistency, and still cannot keep pace with a roster that never stops growing. For a live title that cannot afford to slow down, neither can the pipeline.
Presets, Pipelines, and a Workflow that Actually Scales
Wargaming integrated InstaLOD directly into their existing 3ds Max workflow with no pipeline rebuild and no retraining. The technical art team built a preset-driven system on top of InstaLOD’s 3ds Max integration, defining parameters once and applying them reliably across every vehicle that followed. LOD files are generated, correctly named, and placed in the right position in the file hierarchy automatically. Artists process multiple LODs for the same asset simultaneously, and new presets can be added as requirements evolve without touching the underlying pipeline.
As Senior Technical Artist Alex Jerez describes it:
“By working with presets, and feeding them to InstaLOD’s scripted pipeline, the team can quickly process multiple LODs with expected and reliable results.”
Chavez underscores how deeply the tool is embedded:
“This process is a standard requirement for our pipeline — every Cold War tank, every milestone — to ensure that builds remain stable and performant.”
What previously took hours or days now takes minutes, and the cost savings compound just as fast as the problem once did. Artists are redirected towards creative work, and because InstaLOD preserves each tank’s silhouette through every LOD step, the visual accuracy Cold War mode’s gameplay depends on is never compromised. Players identify enemy vehicles by outline, target weak spots in armor, and experience stable frame rates during large matches because the geometry holds up at every level of detail.
A Proven Pipeline with Expanding Horizons
InstaLOD has proven itself as a production-critical tool for World of Tanks Modern Armor, enabling Wargaming to ship performant, visually consistent content at scale. As production demands continue to grow across their portfolio, Wargaming is also actively exploring Abstract’s unified 3D platform, and especially InstaMAT, to also help with the challenges the complex production of a title like World of Tanks Modern Armor poses.
First published: 15th April 2026