Leonard.hinz

Animation

Coding

ASCII Generator

28. January 2025

A custom After Effects script developed to generate animated ASCII visuals for use in digital concepts. Created as a unique visual identity element for a potential website design.

Overview

The goal of this project was to build a flexible ASCII generator inside After Effects that could convert any composition into ASCII-based animation.
The tool was originally intended to serve as a distinct visual feature for a website mockup, showcasing an alternative way of processing 3D objects and motion graphics. The script was written using Cursor and the Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit CC, allowing full control over the conversion process.
Once executed, it automatically generates ASCII layers, applies character or image-based glyphs, and provides several parameters for fine-tuning the result. To demonstrate the tool in a practical context, a 3D statue was modeled and animated in Blender, then processed through the generator. This ASCII output was integrated into a minimal website-style layout to show how the effect could be used in a digital interface.

Generator & Features

The ASCII Generator includes multiple modes and customization options to control how footage is converted:

Character Modes

Image Mode

Characters

Converts the image into ASCII based on brightness values.
The character list is ordered from dark → bright.
The first character in the list is assigned to the darkest areas,
the last character is assigned to the brightest areas.
This allows full control over how the shading translates into ASCII.

Images

Instead of characters, the generator can use small images as glyphs.

Images are initially assigned numeric indices (1–9).
Low numbers = dark values, high numbers = bright values,
following the same mapping logic as the character mode.
Users can rearrange or delete images to refine the brightness mapping.

Adjustable Settings

- Custom dark-to-bright character lists

- Scale multiplier: 0.5 / 1 / 1.5 / 2 / 4

- Ignore Black toggle for cleaner outputs

- Automatic layer creation inside After Effects

- Post-generation updates (size, spacing, density, blending)

ExtendScript (JSX) — code excerpt inside Cursor

Some examples:

ASCII

NORMAL

Website Preview (Practical Example)

To visualize how the ASCII effect could appear inside a real UI, a website mockup was created.

ASCII

C4D VIEW

Jersey design 01

Stylized Cinema 4D render for better ASCII results

Next Steps

Planned improvements for future versions include:

Better performance and optimized sampling, especially for high-resolution inputs
Color mapping options, allowing ASCII with colored glyphs or luminance-based tinting
A preset library for character sets, image packs, density profiles, and scaling templates
Improved glyph distribution and spacing logic for more accurate brightness representation
Additional pre-processing tools to improve ASCII clarity, such as automatic application of
Posterize, Black & White, and other utility effects to “sterilize” the input footage
before conversion
(cleaner contrast = significantly better ASCII results)