ASCII Renderer – ASCII Art Render Engine for Blender

👉 See all my Blender addons on BlendKit >

ASCII Renderer adds a new render engine to Blender that turns your 3D scene into ASCII art. Pick ASCII as the render engine and every F12 render, every animation frame and the Rendered viewport draw your models as characters, live, while you model, animate and move the camera.

It works like the ASCII art tools people use for images and video, built into a real render engine: each cell of a character grid measures the brightness of the shaded scene and picks the character whose ink coverage matches it. Characters are measured from the real font, sorted from empty to full and spaced evenly or by density. Shape matching picks the character whose ink sits where the detail is, edge detection on depth, normals and brightness draws outlines with | - / and \ the way hand-made ASCII art does, and dithering keeps soft gradients smooth.

Start from one of 13 looks with one click: Classic, Full Color, Contour, Digital Rain, Amber Terminal, Green CRT, Newsprint, Blueprint, Blocks, Braille, Pixel, ANSI and Game Boy. Then change anything, or press Surprise Me for a random look.

Features
- A real render engine: F12 stills, animations and the Rendered viewport in real time
- 13 one-click styles with picture thumbnails, plus Surprise Me
- 12 character sets (standard, detailed 70-level ramp, blocks, braille, half blocks, katakana, binary, hex and more) or your own characters and font
- Brightness, shape matching and random (Matrix) character mapping
- Edge characters from depth, normals and brightness, or edges only
- Mono, scene color, gradient and retro palettes (ANSI 16, xterm 256, CGA, C64, PICO-8, Game Boy, Teletext)
- Solid, tinted, image or transparent backgrounds for compositing
- Exposure, filmic tone mapping, contrast, gamma, invert and Bayer dithering
- Effects: digital rain, glow, scanlines, flicker and depth fog
- Uses your scene lights with sun shadows, materials, colors and image textures
- Cell size in pixels or as a column count; in camera view the viewport grid matches the F12 render
- Export the characters as plain text, 24-bit ANSI color text or a colored HTML page, or send them to the Text Editor
- Fast: the whole pipeline runs on the GPU, a few milliseconds per viewport frame

Requires Blender 4.2 or newer. Tested on Blender 4.2, 4.5 and 5.2 LTS.

Installation

In Blender open Edit, Preferences, Get Extensions, then use Install from Disk and pick the ascii_renderer zip.

Usage

• In the Render Properties set Render Engine to ASCII. The ASCII panel appears right below it.
• Click the style picture to choose one of 13 looks, step through them with the arrows, or press Surprise Me.
• Switch the 3D viewport to Rendered shading to see the ASCII image live. In camera view the character grid matches the F12 render.
• Choose the characters, the cell size, the colors and the background in the first panel. Tone, Edges, Effects, Scene Lighting and Text Output hold the finer settings.
• Press F12 to render. Text Output copies the characters, opens them in the Text Editor or exports them as plain text, ANSI color text or HTML; Save Text Files writes a text file next to every animation frame.

Use the Standard view transform (one click in the panel) so the characters show exactly the colors you picked.

Which Blender versions are supported?

Blender 4.2 and newer. It is tested on Blender 4.2, 4.5 and 5.2 LTS.

Does it need Cycles or EEVEE?

No. ASCII is its own GPU render engine. It shades the scene with your lights, materials and textures and converts it to characters, both in F12 renders and in the Rendered viewport.

Can I get the characters as text?

Yes. After an F12 render you can copy the characters, open them in the Text Editor, or export them as plain text, 24-bit ANSI color text or an HTML page. For animations, Save Text Files writes one file per frame.

Can I use my own characters and font?

Yes. Pick Custom in the character set and type your own characters; they are measured and sorted by ink density automatically. Any .ttf or .otf font can be used.