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Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine
- Itious 3mo agoThis is great! I’m going to use this for my website thanks!
- apresmoi 3mo agosend it over when you have it so I can put it in the showcase :)
- smalltorch 3mo agoThis 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 3mo agoThanks! 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)
- karlmush 3mo agoLove this!
- melvinczyk 3mo agoI have been looking for a tool like this for so long. Very cool I will def be using for my website
- Retr0id 3mo 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.
- alightsoul 3mo agomaybe to prove the output is purely text only?
- khazhoux 3mo agoWhen 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 3mo agoCool things are allowed to be practical and well-engineered, too. Either way, it seems weird to list a disadvantage as a headline feature.
- khazhoux 3mo agoSure. 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- electroglyph 3mo agoheh, i came here to say basically the same thing
- swiftcoder 3mo agoPresumably because its an intentional throwback to the era when most people didn't have a GPU?
- 3mo ago
- deftio 3mo agoWow. Where was this in the 90s when I "needed" it. Is there a console version?
- apresmoi 3mo agoworking on it!
- ofabioroma 3mo agoAbsolutely incredible
- shshhssjjww 3mo agoWell done, Claude!
- 4k0hz 3mo agoIs 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.
- dimbletimbers 3mo agoClaude had never seen that in its training data.
- rckt 3mo agoWhat’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 3mo agohttps://github.com/apresmoi/glyphcss 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 3mo 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 ;-)
- kristopolous 3mo agoThe only consistent things I've heard is volume. You gotta effectively spam and some things stick. It also has to be cognitively stupid to understand - the least amount of knowledge or suppositions required. I've found myself on the front page maybe 5 times... Someone else posted my stuff. I find the algo game to be morally repugnant so I don't play it. I just build things and hope they're useful to the right audiences
- soupspaces 3mo agoIt pairs well with a 3d splatting story in the front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48618481 despite the slop
- pizzaballs 3mo ago[flagged]
- khazhoux 3mo agoI understand this was probably vibe-coded, but it's still a lot of fun. Well done!
- kevincocks 3mo ago[dead]
- frankzero 3mo agoSeeing 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 3mo agoDwarf Fortress 3D obviously
- arlattimore 3mo agoThat is very cool, dare I say impressive (at least in my opinion). Folks need to ease up a little I think.
- codingconstable 3mo agoThats fantastic. Someone make a video game using it
- smusamashah 3mo agoIs it like a filter on top of graphical 3D rendering or is everything rasterized in ascii from the basics?
- sheerazali 3mo ago[flagged]
- 28304283409234 3mo agoMan and I thought `bb` was impressive!
- lionkor 3mo agoLol the AGENTS.md: > NO Co-Authored-By: Claude trailer. > NO " Generated with Claude Code" footer in PR bodies, commit messages, issue comments, or anywhere else. I actually have a much better idea how to use AI responsibly: Simply don't use Claude to completely vibe code AND COMMIT your code. There is no doubt in my mind that this is vibe-coded, in the bad sense, because of this line. There is no workflow that lets Claude write code AND commit, without PRs, that includes review by a human. This is not the HN I signed up for. I don't mind AI use, responsible AI use, but zero oversight has not worked and will not work.
- dax_ 3mo agoGosh, It's so hard to be excited about any software project nowadays, because I cannot know how much effort was actually put into it. For all I know the author merely wrote a few prompts and paid Anthropic for the tokens. Good job I guess?
- lionkor 3mo agoI think simply stating the extent of AI use openly is a good start. For example, this is what I've done on my hobby project[0]. I feel like an AI use disclosure page or document helps, especially when you didn't vibe-code but still used AI in a somewhat responsible way (for review, for writing tests, writing CI pipeline stuff, etc.). [0]: https://libls.org/ai-use https://libls.org/ai-use
- qwertox 3mo ago"I actually have a much better idea how to use AI responsibly: Simply don't use Claude to completely vibe code AND COMMIT your code." I usually open a new chat in the ide and ask it to "generate a commit message", then i copy paste it. This means that if my code was written 20% by me and 80% by Google Antigravity, and Claude then adds a Co-Authored-By-line, then i think it's wrong. All it did was generate a commit message.
- lionkor 3mo agoThat's fair, but that workflow is amateurish at best anyway. You're free to do that, if that's how you work, or if it all gets squashed in the end regardless, but a more sustainable workflow is to make committing itself an explicit part of self-review. Here's what I do: `git commit -p`, which basically shows you chunks of changes and you can confirm whether you want to stage those changes. This forces you to briefly review your changes and allows you to select lines or chunks that you don't want to commit (yet). Then, you have a lot of context, so then its much easier to compose a commit message. Your editor auto-opens at the end of that, so you type in WHY you made the changes (and if you don't know, at least put WHAT you did), save and close the editor, and that's one commit. If you skip all of this, the commits are less likely to help you later when you need them.
- limsight 3mo agoThis is really cool!
- AltruisticGapHN 3mo agoWe need a new term like appslop
- senfiaj 3mo agoCool. I also had similar idea: https://github.com/surenenfiajyan/3d.js https://github.com/surenenfiajyan/3d.js . But your one looks richer in features.
- MisterTea 3mo agoNice to see that it renders in pure 7 bit ASCII without using any code page 437 or Unicode characters.
- bitlad 3mo agoFolks commenting on Hacker News are acting how VC investors are acting in the market now. Everything is doom and gloom for anything that is software. Oh claude can do this, claude can do that. It is written by claude oh it is of no value. No. Creativity matters. Originality matters. Serendipity matters. Execution can use claude, but it is does not displace value.
- novoreorx 3mo agoI have a feeling this may be good for making pixel art games on the web
- jesse__ 3mo agoCool project! I viewed the landing page on mobile (chrome, android) and touching to drag the globe worked once or twice, but stopped working afterwards. The globe would appear to freeze (and, actually, the whole page locked up for a second or two), but then resume rotating on its own. Seems fairly reproducible on reloading the page. Nice work!
- apresmoi 3mo agoThanks for the report, I have fixed it already!