August 13, 2014

Value Noise vs. Perlin Noise

Update 2014-11-22: Read more about Perlin noise here!

I had a revelation.

I discovered everything I thought I knew about Perlin noise is in fact… wrong.

Well, perhaps it’s not quite that dramatic.

Thanks to recent internet posts, I realized what I thought was Perlin noise is actually called value noise. Perlin noise - while similar to value noise - uses a significantly different algorithm. Both can combine octaves in the same way to create a form of fractal noise.

Apparently this is a common mistake as many of the resources I used also mistakenly identify value noise as Perlin noise.

To rectify this situation I’ve updated my code to correctly label value noise as such. As a bonus, I’ve included real Perlin noise and I’ll be posting more about that in the near future.

./bin/fractal_noise -a value -s 1138 -w 256 -h 256 -n

./bin/fractal_noise -a perlin -s 1138 -w 256 -h 256 -n

value noiseperlin noise

I’ve also updated my past posts to refer to the correct types of noise:

Other Resources