mildmelon

Thank you, glad you like the tool!

Thank you, glad you're enjoying it!

Thank you!

Author here, yes you're correct. The name is a bit of misnomer, and to do it truly with ASCII I'd have to move data back to the CPU which had pretty bad performance. I took a bit of artistic liberty and decided to draw my own ASCII-esque glyphs using signed distance functions. I'm considering adding a setting to swap the modes so that it does use true ASCII but again it'd be pretty rough performance on large screens.

Author here. Sounds like a great idea! If you are able to build it I'd love to see, tag me on socials or send it to me please c:

Author here, I've replied to the parent comment, hope that clears it up!

Author here, you're mostly right in that it's a show piece. However, it uses no external libraries, I built it all myself using VanillaJS. I do use some famous noise algorithms, specifically Simplex noise and a method of domain warping.

Author here.

It's a fun experiment into WebGL and graphics programming. I intended it to be a cool tool for getting inspiration for designing and creating other art in general. I do eventually want to build this out into a larger set of tools that would allow you to quickly iterate and build out various aesthetics for designing.

In it's current state, it's mostly practical for creating pretty images and videos that you could use in other projects. If there's more interest I could possibly turn it into more, would love to hear ideas and suggestions!

Author here. This is all done on the GPU using shaders. It's a few layers, and you can find the details over on my Bluesky post, feel free to read it there. I've been thinking about making a blog post covering how I went about building it.

https://bsky.app/profile/caidan.dev/post/3mcdwifkfvc2o

Author here. Now that's a great idea! I might have to try and get it published there!

Author here. Not ridiculous at all, the name is a bit of a misnomer. I had tried doing true ASCII but moving data back to the CPU to render it all was too slow. So I opted to recreate them as glyphs that are drawn using signed distance functions, which gets pretty close to looking like real ASCII while still being incredibly performant due to it never leaving the GPU.

Author here. Thanks so much for the kind feedback, I appreciate that you are getting so much joy out of it!

Author here. Thanks for the kind words, glad you're having fun with it!

Author here. That's so cool, thanks for sharing!

Author here.

Yes you're right in that it's not real ASCII, but more ASCII-esque. I took some artistic liberty to do everything on the GPU, if I had done true ASCII I would have had to move data back to the CPU and render the glyphs there. However it was too slow and didn't have the desired effect I was seeking.

I am considering building out an additional feature set where it allows for true ASCII rendering, but we'll see if I get around to that.

Author here. Haha that's so creative! I definitely thought about lowering the limit, but then it wouldn't really be ASCII-esque lol. I might just lower it so that you don't have to do this workaround.

Author here. Interesting idea, I might have to tinker with it!

Author here. Wow that's so cool! I've never heard of browsh but it's so cool to see that my site (which was built to be as static as possible) works well and even renders the WebGL in the terminal. Thanks for sharing!

Author here, looks great! Thanks for sharing!

Author here. Interesting point about the satellite-view clouds, I'm not very familiar with that domain. But I can point you to the article I read about domain warping on top of noise, which is what I use to produce this effect.

https://iquilezles.org/articles/warp/

Author here. P5JS is great and I've used it in the past. However you can get pretty far with just VanillaJS. Here's the source code to the ASCII Clouds tool, it's almost all plain JS.

https://github.com/caidanw/caidanw.github.io/blob/main/src/p...

Author here. Thanks so much for the rad reply and enthusiasm! So glad I could help inspire you, and please feel free to use this for any art you make, just tag me on socials or send it my way so I can check it out.

Author here. It’s likely the noise amount you’ve set or the glyph thresholds. I’m still tweaking it and trying to get it to be a bit more consistent.

Author here. Thanks for the kind words! And I appreciate you sharing that tool, definitely checking it out!

Author here, so happy to hear you enjoyed the tool!

Author here. That’s a nice trick! I’ve been pondering on how to handle this but I think I’m going to allow the ability to toggle on/off the presence of glyphs so that you don’t have to muck around with the thresholds to get them to not render.

Author here, I love that tool you built. Super nice effects and I’d love to see mobile support if you add it.

Author here, thanks for sharing your library looks very useful! I’ll have to check it out for sure!