Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine

rckt 1 hour 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.

kristopolous 1 hour ago | |

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

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

soupspaces 13 minutes ago | |

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

4k0hz 1 hour 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.

Retr0id 2 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.

khazhoux 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.

electroglyph 1 hour ago | |

heh, i came here to say basically the same thing

alightsoul 1 hour ago | |

maybe to prove the output is purely text only?

smalltorch 3 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)

frankzero 35 minutes 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.

deftio 2 hours ago |

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

Is there a console version?

ofabioroma 2 hours ago |

Absolutely incredible

khazhoux 1 hour ago |

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

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

shshhssjjww 2 hours ago |

Well done, Claude!

karlmush 3 days ago |

Love this!

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 :)