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.
Please direct questions to garrett@fairburn.dev.
- 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.
# 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.
$ 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.