foxbud / rendascii

ASCII 3D rendering engine

RendASCII

RendASCII is a real-time, z-buffering based 3D rendering engine written from scratch in and for Python 3. Unlike traditional real-time rendering engines, RendASCII renders frames as printable strings using ASCII characters for pixels. RendASCII is open source under the MIT license.

Project Homepage

Project Documentation

Please direct questions to [email protected].

Features

• No external dependencies; uses just the Python standard library.
• Multiprocess based rendering.
• Optional Cython based accelerator extension modules.
• Load and render 3D models from Wavefront object and material files (*.obj and *.mtl, respectively).
• Load and render 2D sprites from ASCII based Portable PixMap files (*.ppm).
• Render the same or different scene(s) using multiple virtual cameras.
• ASCII overlays for displaying fixed graphics and/or information.
• Map sprite and material colors to ASCII characters using JSON colormaps.
• Transform models, sprites, and virtual cameras using arbitrary homogeneous transformation matrices.
• Utility for easily constructing complex transformation matrices with scaling, translations, and rotations.
• Utility for managing frame-rate and calculating delta time.

Installation

Using Pip

# pip3 install rendascii - download and install pure Python distribution.

# pip3 install --no-binary rendascii rendascii - download source distribution, build accelerator extension modules, and install resulting binary distribution.

Manual

$ git clone https://github.com/Foxbud/rendascii.git - clone repository source.

$ cd rendascii - change working directory to cloned source.

# python3 -m setup install - build accelerator extension modules and install resulting binary distribution.

# PURE_PY_DIST=true python3 -m setup install - build and install pure Python distribution.