Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine

smusamashah•5 minutes ago

Is it like a filter on top of graphical 3D rendering or is everything rasterized in ascii from the basics?

arlattimore•43 minutes ago

That is very cool, dare I say impressive (at least in my opinion). Folks need to ease up a little I think.

smalltorch•4 days ago

This is actually pretty awesome. I enjoyed going through all the models.

I'm also not sure why I love ASCII art so much. Maybe it's because it's such an abstract way to represent something, yet our brains make perfect sense of everything.

The shading is where it all comes to life.

What is the file size of one single model on average?

apresmoi•3 days ago

Thanks! The gallery holds real 3D files (.glb/.obj/.vox), ~300 KB each. The ASCII isn't stored, it's rendered live from the mesh. Its size only depends on the grid resolution, not the model: a full-screen view is ~150×50 characters, so around ~10 KB of text (a cube and a detailed mesh would produce the same byte count)

rckt•about 3 hours ago

What’s up with filtering of clearly low effort AI posts here?

Every now and then I see this crap here. And people even engage into discussion. This is ridiculous.

noduerme•about 1 hour ago

I was gonna say that this kind of thing is a big yawn in the age of asking an LLM to do something like this. I think it would have been interesting if the author had gone a bit further and made it a useful command line tool for something. I'm impressed by demos to the extent that they show skill. I'm impressed by tools to the extent that they show an understanding of the process. I'm not sure whether this accomplishes either.

kristopolous•about 2 hours ago

https://github.com/apresmoi/glyphcss

I wouldn't call it low effort ... seems to be done over the course of months.

I agree it's absurd that those 4 commits started this morning projects that get huge hype and screaming fanboys, but I don't think this is that.

soupspaces•about 1 hour ago

It pairs well with a 3d splatting story in the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618481 despite the slop

4k0hz•about 3 hours ago

Is there a good reason not to use WebGL to render the scene and compute the character mapping? Even if you're dead set on outputting text to a `<pre>` you could write the ascii values out to a framebuffer and copy from that for a pretty significant speedup.

codingconstable•17 minutes ago

Thats fantastic. Someone make a video game using it

Retr0id•about 3 hours ago

> No WebGL

Why is this an advantage? I have a GPU and I'd rather it was used. As-is, one of my CPU cores is pegged at 100% just rendering the landing page.

swiftcoder•4 minutes ago

Presumably because its an intentional throwback to the era when most people didn't have a GPU?

khazhoux•about 2 hours ago

When the topic is rendering 3d models using ASCII glyphs, we've already exited the realm of advantages and disadvantages. This is just supposed to be cool.

Retr0id•about 2 hours ago

Cool things are allowed to be practical and well-engineered, too. Either way, it seems weird to list a disadvantage as a headline feature.

khazhoux•about 2 hours ago

Sure. But I think the idea is already absurd, so I'm not expecting a performant engine out of it.

I get your point though, that the same ASCII rendering effect might be doable at much higher scale without pegging the CPU.

alightsoul•about 3 hours ago

maybe to prove the output is purely text only?

electroglyph•about 2 hours ago

heh, i came here to say basically the same thing

deftio•about 3 hours ago

Wow. Where was this in the 90s when I "needed" it.

Is there a console version?

frankzero•about 2 hours ago

Seeing some of your rendered 3D models in ASCII glyphs reminded me of 3D pixelated video games. It is really cool, but I fail to see its applications.

taffydavid•36 minutes ago

Dwarf Fortress 3D obviously

ofabioroma•about 3 hours ago

Absolutely incredible

shshhssjjww•about 3 hours ago

Well done, Claude!

melvinczyk•3 days ago

I have been looking for a tool like this for so long. Very cool I will def be using for my website

karlmush•3 days ago

Love this!

khazhoux•about 2 hours ago

I understand this was probably vibe-coded, but it's still a lot of fun. Well done!

Itious•3 days ago

This is great! I’m going to use this for my website thanks!

apresmoi•3 days ago

send it over when you have it so I can put it in the showcase :)

Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine

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