Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine

(glyphcss.com)

93 points | by apresmoi 3 days ago

17 comments

  • arlattimore 52 minutes ago
    That is very cool, dare I say impressive (at least in my opinion). Folks need to ease up a little I think.
  • smusamashah 13 minutes ago
    Is it like a filter on top of graphical 3D rendering or is everything rasterized in ascii from the basics?
  • 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)
  • rckt 2 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 56 minutes 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 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.

      • ErroneousBosh 5 minutes ago
        > 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.

        Is that what I'm doing wrong?

        If I start a new project this morning, push about four commits to it, and bang it up on here, it'll go to the front page? I'd love for anything I've done to get that much traction ;-)

    • soupspaces 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
    • pizzaballs 1 hour ago
      [flagged]
  • 4k0hz 2 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.
  • Retr0id 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 13 minutes ago
      Presumably because its an intentional throwback to the era when most people didn't have a GPU?
    • khazhoux 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 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 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 2 hours ago
      maybe to prove the output is purely text only?
    • electroglyph 2 hours ago
      heh, i came here to say basically the same thing
  • codingconstable 25 minutes ago
    Thats fantastic. Someone make a video game using it
  • deftio 3 hours ago
    Wow. Where was this in the 90s when I "needed" it.

    Is there a console version?

  • frankzero 1 hour 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 45 minutes ago
      Dwarf Fortress 3D obviously
  • ofabioroma 3 hours ago
    Absolutely incredible
  • shshhssjjww 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!
  • sheerazali 4 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • kevincocks 1 hour ago
    [dead]
  • khazhoux 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 :)