1 HN user recommended this tutorial1 month2024–2026score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Pointed to as a nice overview of implementing ASCII rendering as a post-processing shader.
Acerola explores building a shader that turns games into ASCII art, walking through techniques such as brightness mapping and edge detection to see whether it looks good.
“This video is a nice overview of implementing a variation of the style in a post-processing shader” (HN, 2025)
I suspect you'll have much better luck directly implementing the style you want rather than trying to get a (current gen) AI to reliably generate ANSI art. This video is a nice overview of implementing a variation of the style in a post-processing shader: [this video]
Overview of implementing ASCII style as post-processing shader
Cool, might want to consider going even further, and add a full ascii player to it :) [this video] (Acerolla did some crazy stuff but as a filter, but others have done it in actually consoles) [link]
> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer. Acerola worked a bit on this in 2024[1], using edge detection to layer correctly oriented |/-\ over the usual brightness-only pass. I think either technique has cases where one looks better than the other. [1] [this video]
Edge detection layered over brightness ASCII rendering
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