I'm pretty sure it's rendering strings but there's also the technique of post processing on the GPU like this

https://threejs.org/examples/?q=asc#webgl_effects_ascii

This video goes into depth about ASCII rendering as a post processing effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg40RWiaHRY

IMHO in this video the end result doesn't qualify as ASCII art - square letters in particular are a deal breaker to me.

It is still a cool shader that turns input into text, even if it doesn't have the ascii art vibe.

ASCII just refers to the 7bit standard, so if we are pedantic ASCII art is just art using the printable characters of the 128 code points defined in it. Font size doesn't have anything to do with it. But ASCII art is used as an umbrella term, encompassing a variety of different standards, character sets and fonts. There are a bunch of square ASCII, like PETSCII, ATASCII and even PC ASCII can be rendered with a 8x8 cp437 font. We don't need to gatekeep what "qualifies" as ASCII art.

> There are a bunch of square ASCII, like PETSCII

Note that e.g. PETSCII, while internally 8x8, would be displayed using non-square pixels[1] - also not resulting in square letters.

[1]: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/13871

“goes into depth”

I see what you did there

(without intending to do it)

Reminds me of https://asciicker.com/.

Amazing!

Self plug: the “ASCII Playground“ has a couple of 3D demos as well!

DOM manipulation is fast enough to allow text output into a PRE element as long as text color is not changed too often (each style change needs the affected chars wrapped into a SPAN).

https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz

Anyone who attempts to generate 3-dimensional renders by textual means is living in a state of sin(x).

If this is sin, give me chastity and continence, but not yet :)

Cos(x) players are welcome!

Are we not all sinusoidal in the eyes of the Function?

My younger self cries out in joy. So 1980s when you could print an ASCII picture of yourself on mugs and Ts

BBS vibes as well.

I did quite a lot of printing on dot matrix printers as well.

This immediately reminded me of this ascii graphics library https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/ which I found on HN a while ago

Immediately reminds me of: https://aa-project.sourceforge.net/index.html

So, as long it uses only text, it can be called ASCII art, not just characters from space to tilde (or null to tilde)?

Its just 3 bits white plus those 7 box art chars.

private Shade = '·┼╬'; [1]

Would have expected something more sophisticated, where the shader also looks at subpixels, where it gets the best matching char for the shape and brightness.

Like rastapasta map renderer did with the braille block:

https://github.com/rastapasta/mapscii

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39975887

---

https://github.com/kciter/ascii-3d-renderer.js/blob/1f1a8493... [1]

Shades and Box art chars where never part of any ASCII standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437

Technically no ASCII but that's just for purists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art#%22Block_ASCII%22_/_...

Colloquially, yes.

Yes, sadly this semantic battle has already been lost.

see also: donut.c which renders a 3d spinning torus in ascii. https://www.a1k0n.net/2006/09/15/obfuscated-c-donut.html

explanation with animations: https://www.a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html