If you look difficult enough, most of the jobs we function on these pages have some practical value. They may seem frivolous, however there’s usually something that compelled the hacker to dedicate time as well as effort to its doing. That doesn’t mean we don’t get our share of just-for-funsies projects, of course, which definitely explains this on the internet 3D ASCII art generator.

But wait — perhaps that’s not rather right. After all, [Andrew Sink] put a great deal of time into the code for this, as well as for its predecessor, his automatic 3D low-poly generator. That job led to the present work, which like before takes an STL design as input, this time around turning it into an ASCII art render. The character set utilized for shading the design is customizable; with the default set, the shading is surprisingly good, though. You can likewise switch to a black-on-white style if you like, navigate around the design with the mouse, as well as even export the ASCII art as either a PNG or as a raw text file, no question appropriate to send to your tractor-feed printer.

[Andrew]’s code, which is all up on GitHub, makes liberal utilize of the three.js library, so perhaps stretching his 3D JavaScript skills is truly the hidden practical element of this one. Not that it needs one — we believe it’s great just for the gee-whiz factor.

[via Twitter]