Show HN: An ASCII 3D Rendering Engine

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?

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

> 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.

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.

Cool 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!

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

Is there a console version?

Cool. I also had similar idea: https://github.com/surenenfiajyan/3d.js . But your one looks richer in features.

Nice to see that it renders in pure 7 bit ASCII without using any code page 437 or Unicode characters.