We turned handmade art dolls into playable 3D characters in the browser

Description and use

We turned handmade dolls into playable 3D characters, optimizing textures and load times for browser play.

Problem

Convert physical handmade dolls into interactive 3D characters while preserving recognizability and meeting web performance constraints.

Outcome

Dolls are now playable 3D characters in a browser world; initial load reduced from 98.7 MB to 41.7 MB by skipping the 57 MB ASTC layer in a lite build, while maintaining high‑resolution textures on demand.

Workflow

• Select maker’s photos to preserve recognizability
• Reconstruct doll into canonical standing pose, normalise background, pose and lighting
• Rig and animate with a small set of stock clips (idle, walk, run, sit, wave, dance)
• Apply quality gate: colour match, feet on ground plane, remove display stand
• Install as floor‑anchored GLB with LODs

Evidence

We wanted to know what happens if that doll does not stop at the product page. So we built Doll World: a browser 3D world where the physical doll becomes a character that walks around

Source

One texture was 86% of a 22MB asset

Source

First load was 98.7MB

Source

We deliberately did not trade away polygons or final texture resolution to get there.

Source

Ship what works, park what does not.

Source