3D rendering in a console window
ico-demo.mp4
Like my other 3D project here, this project was heavily inspired by parts of the video series by javid9x here. While I didn't completely copy his code, I figure it's safe for me to attribute it here (part 1) and here (part 2).
I originally implemented that code using
- pygame first, which was quite nice for drawing triangles easily but also quite slow, and
- openGL second, which was quite difficult to learn but ran on the GPU, and so was much faster.
After a while I decided I wanted to do a similar thing but in the console, because the look of ascii characters in 3D is quite pleasing in my opinion. This was also inspired by the classic spinning donut in C.
While doing this project, I learned
- A lot more details about how 3D perspective projection works (although I'm sure I still don't fully understand it)
- How to use
ncursesto write stuff to a console window
I don't expect to revisit this unless it would be to fix the annoying bug that the width scaling isn't quite right, but I don't really know how to fix that and I'm out of motivation to try. On a 1920x1080 screen with the console taking up the full screen, the scaling should be just about right.
On Linux this should run out of the box. On Windows you need an ncurses clone like windows-curses:
pip install windows-curses