I made a tool for generating ASCII art from source images using certain parts of the UTF-8 character set. This is unique from other ASCII art generators because it takes into account both the shade and the shape of the characters. My proof of concept is the following (the first image from my last post):
The text file is available for download here. If you have trouble seeing the correct characters, look at it in notepad++ with the UTF-8 encoding.
If you want a specific image to be made into ASCII art, leave a comment, and I'll make another post with the best results.