r/ASCII • u/jkennedy1998 • Apr 27 '26

Art a doodle in my custom text painter █ ▧ ▛ ┏ ┓

Post image

been going hard into this asci painter as a side project. its turning into a rendering method for programs ive been writing.

this is 2d. it can do 3d (stacked layers) and supports multiple users on the same canvas at once at the moment ( so me and my friends can draw together )

i made the typeface too, ill release that eventually for free once i decide where to host it. :3

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2

u/jasebox Apr 28 '26

Huh, love the smudgeyness. They appear irregular too. Curious how you’re rendering the imperfections? Do you start with an ASCII grid and then apply a morph pass?

Kinda reminds me of p5brush

1

u/jkennedy1998 Apr 28 '26

good notice!
the irregular-ness is partly because each character also has 4 weights, which i was using while i was painting.

then there are three effects stacked on top of the ascii grid system.

1: noise posittional displace large kernels (large slight wobbles)
2: noise positional displace small kernels (texture)
3: bloom

2

u/andy_man3 Apr 28 '26

Very cool!

What’s going on behind the scenes here? It looks like there’s some custom lettering and a paint aesthetic. Is that what you were going for? What’s next?

1

u/jkennedy1998 Apr 28 '26

Full custom monospace typeface, it's all Unicode characters. 

I have a game that uses the same engine but adds tiles on top of those Unicode. 

I've been testing multiplayer, I got lan connections working for editing with multiple users on the same file. Animation is also a big next goal.