Perlin Noise

From Lazarus-ccr

This page is the start of a tutorial about using Perlin Noise on LCL applications to generate natural looking images. It will cover both basic theory and real usage examples, with a focus on compilable examples.

Perlin Noise was invented by Ken Perlin to generate textures for a movie called Tron. Today it is widely used on movies and video games to produce natural looking smoke, landscapes, clouds and any texture including marble, irregular glass, etc.

1 Getting Started
2 First Example
3 Persistence Example
4 Subversion
5 External Links

[edit] Getting Started

Perlin Noise is based on the idea of fractals, that things in nature show different degrees of change. On a rocky mountain landscape for example when can see changes with a very big amplitude, which are the mountains themselves. Smaller changes represent irregularities on those mountains and even smaller ones represent rocks.

[edit] First Example

This application demonstrates a simple noise function with the following properties:

Only 1 harmonic present
Amplitude of 250 pixels
Wavelength of 20 pixels
Frequency of 0.05
You can use a combo box to choose between Linear, Cossine and Cubic interpolation

Files:

noise1d.lpi
noise1d.dpr
noise.pas

[edit] Persistence Example

This application demonstrates how to sum many noise functions to get a perlin noise function. It has the following properties:

3 harmonics present
Amplitudes of 250, 125 and 62 pixels
Wavelength of 20, 10, and 5 pixels
Frequency of 0.05, 0.1, 0.2
You can use a combo box to choose between Linear, Cossine and Cubic interpolation