ASCII Machine-Vision Animated Short
A 3D animated short made in Blender, set on a future Earth where humanity has gone extinct and semi-sentient mecha houses traverse the landscape rebuilding damaged ecosystems. With no human observer left, the only view of the world is the machine's view — so the entire environment is rendered as compressed ASCII data, where every character carries a functional meaning about what the machine has detected.
I built the full encoding system inside Blender's compositor: each scene is split into its render passes (depth, normal, position, colour) and run through a custom ASCII converter that assigns different character sets to different elements — water, fire, organic, inorganic. The mecha themselves stay photoreal, because they're the ones doing the encoding; the world, parsed through their sensors, becomes data.
Made as part of my Master of Animation, Games & Interactivity at RMIT University.
Viewport scene
Render passes feed into the PreASCII node group
Inside the node group: preps the data and splits the Z-depth into close, middle and far mattes.
Custom character glyphs fed in as image inputs — any character set can be swapped in here.
The image is pixelated into a grid, and then each cell's luminance picks a character
A ladder of Greater/Less Than nodes isolates each brightness band and maps it to a glyph.
The full luminance-banding network — each band assigned its own character across the tonal range.
All encoded layers and mattes are exported into a single multilayer EXR for the final composite.
Final frame. The world is rendered entirely as the machine's compressed ASCII view.