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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.

Live in the Rendered viewport
Pick ASCII as the render engine, click a style and drag a slider: the viewport redraws as characters in real time.

13 one-click styles
Green and amber phosphor, classic terminal, blueprint, newsprint, contour lines and more, each one click away.

Surprise Me
One click picks a random look: characters, colors, palette, edges and effects together.

Digital rain
Katakana rain falls through your model, animated with the timeline, with glow, scanlines and flicker.

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.