ascii-animation

ascii-animation is a skill for Claude Code from iart-ai/web-animation-skills. It costs 98 tokens per session (2,592 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for creating animations made from text characters, such as terminal loaders, browser effects, or moving ASCII art. ASCII art represents pictures and motion using letters, numbers, and symbols.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to convert images, video frames, or 3D scenes into animated characters, create text-based effects, or add an ASCII layer over a canvas or Three.js scene.
Why use it?
It provides a way to add lightweight retro-style motion without relying on detailed graphic images.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the web-animation-skills plugin — 9 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to convert images, video frames, or 3D scenes into animated characters, create text-based effects, or add an ASCII layer over a canvas or Three.js scene.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/iart-ai/web-animation-skills/ascii-animation
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add iart-ai/web-animation-skills --skill ascii-animation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/iart-ai/web-animation-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install web-animation-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for ascii-animation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iart-ai/web-animation-skills/ascii-animation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/iart-ai/web-animation-skills/ascii-animation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/iart-ai/web-animation-skills/ascii-animation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iart-ai/web-animation-skills/ascii-animation/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for ascii-animation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/iart-ai/web-animation-skills/ascii-animation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/iart-ai/web-animation-skills/ascii-animation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 98 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,592 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 23 Jun 2026
  • Snyk pass 23 Jun 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00098 $0.02592
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.01296
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00518
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00259

Measured 12d ago against content hash a2f45a09e0e6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ascii-animation scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/img-to-ascii.mjs), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/ascii-animation/SKILL.md · 180 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 180 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

ASCII Animation

Render motion entirely with text characters. ASCII output is extremely lightweight, distinctive, and works in browsers (<pre>/canvas), terminals (ANSI), and over any 3D scene (Three.js AsciiEffect).

When to use

  • Build terminal/CLI intros, loaders, banners, or a retro/hacker aesthetic.
  • Convert an image, video frame, or 3D scene into animated ASCII.
  • Add an ASCII post-effect over an existing canvas/WebGL render.
  • Create generative text fields (plasma, sine waves, noise, tunnels).

Core concept: the brightness ramp

Map luminance (0..1) to a character whose ink density matches. Order characters dark-to-light. Pick the index with Math.round(lum * (ramp.length - 1)).

Common ramps (dark to light):

  • Short (10): .:-=+*#%@
  • Medium (16): .'\^",:;Il!i><~+_-?][}{1)(|/tfjrxnuvczXYUJCLQ0OZmwqpdbkhao*#MW&8%B@$` truncated — see table below.
  • Standard 70-level (Paul Bourke), best for photos: $@B%8&WM#*oahkbdpqwmZO0QLCJUYXzcvunxrjft/\|()1{}[]?-_+~<>i!lI;:,"^`'. (reverse for dark-on-light).

Compute relative luminance from sRGB (perceptual):

const lum = (0.2126 * r + 0.7152 * g + 0.0722 * b) / 255; // 0..1

Invert when drawing dark text on a light background: lum = 1 - lum.

Character cell aspect correction (the #1 gotcha)

Monospace character cells are taller than wide — roughly 0.5 width:height. Sampling a square pixel grid produces a vertically stretched image. Correct by sampling fewer rows than columns: for a target of cols characters wide, use rows = Math.round(cols * (imgH / imgW) * fontAspect) where fontAspect ≈ 0.5. Equivalently, when drawing to an offscreen canvas, set its height to cols * aspect * 0.5.

Web rendering: <pre> vs canvas

  • <pre> + textContent: simplest. One string with \n per row. Fine up to ~120×60 chars at 30fps. Set white-space: pre; font-family: monospace; line-height: 1;.
  • Canvas fillText: needed for per-character color, larger grids, or 60fps. Draw each char at x * cellW, y * cellH. Faster than thousands of DOM nodes.

Read the full file on GitHub · 180 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 180 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A a2f45a09e0e6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ascii-animation is a skill published in the GitHub repository iart-ai/web-animation-skills (21 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 98 tokens to every session and 2,592 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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