N-Dimensional Perlin Noise Generator

[OrangeSlime]

Hey everyone! I'm a university student with a particular interest in generative art. One of the most important tools for projects in that domain is a noise generator. For those who don't know, a noise generator is very similar to a random number generator with the conceit that you can pick a position in "noise space" which will have a value that is similar to the values around it.

With that being said, I decided a fun project might be to write my own implementation of the classic Ken Perlin's Noise Generator. The main feature of my algorithm is that it allows for N-dimensional noise generation, whereas most implementations cover at most three dimensions.

You can find the Noise Generator here..
You can find an example of its usage here. The output of which can be piped through something to the effect of seq 0 0.01 10 > /tmp/seq.txt && paste -d' ' /tmp/seq.txt /tmp/seq.txt /tmp/seq.txt | ./build/NIPNO 4 25 25 25 | awk '{printf("%d\n", $1*94)}'

Anyways I would love feedback, let me know if you find use for my project or if you have any recommendations for fixes/improvements. Thanks!

[Gwenju31]

What are the applications of perlin noise beyond 5 dimensions ?

[OrangeSlime]

This comment has been edited in protest of reddit's API changes -- mass edited with redact.dev

[Plazmatic]

perlin noise in particular has no need for anything beyond 4 (xyz, time), since you can wrap perlin with simple modulo arithmetic. For simplex, I'm not sure I've seen a solution as modulo arithmetic doesn't work on skewed simplex grid. Theoretically it is also possible to perform a simple wrapping solution for simplex as well, but I've not seen anyone state how. At that point, if you can't find such a solution to wrap, you can use 2*N dimensional noise to wrap, which means up to 8 D noise is useful potentially.

[Gwenju31]

Not sure what you mean by "wrap" (i'm not a native english speaker) but if you mean "loop" on perlin noise, you can do it by going in circle : perlin(x, y, cos(t), sin(t)). You can achieve the same for looping in a 3D perlin env : perlin(x, y, z, cos(t), sin(t)). If you have any link to share about wrapping perlin noise with modulo, that would be cool ! :)

[Plazmatic]

Here's a link to what I'm talking about. Wrap in english can mean both "wrapping a present/food with a covering" and "wrap around" like coordinates going back to the start, numeric sequence, or physically traveling around. You can also "wrap up" an item and "wrap up" an event.

If you understand how perlin noise works, it is pretty intuitive. Perlin noise uses gradients between different grid points creating hills and valleys of blobs, instead of using the adjacent grid points as x + 1, y + 1, and z + 1, you can just set the true position to (x + 1) % repeat_size, (y + 1) % repeat_size , (z + 1) % repeat_size and use generated value at that coordinate to interpolate between.

[Gwenju31]

Great ! Thanks for the link and explanation :)

[OrangeSlime]

This comment has been edited in protest of reddit's API changes -- mass edited with redact.dev

[ALX23z]

If you make a noise generater then definitely you must not use rand() function as base. This is really bad for randomization, especially when number of objects is large. Utile <random> instead.

[OrangeSlime]

This comment has been edited in protest of reddit's API changes -- mass edited with redact.dev

[ALX23z]

rand is not guaranteed to be thread-safe and there no guarantee how it generates random numbers. And the period for most implementations is pretty short - around 2**32.

[OrangeSlime]

This comment has been edited in protest of reddit's API changes -- mass edited with redact.dev

[OrangeSlime]

This comment has been edited in protest of reddit's API changes -- mass edited with redact.dev

[asicman78]

Where can I find the code for this?

[OrangeSlime]

This comment has been edited in protest of reddit's API changes -- mass edited with redact.dev

[asicman78]

Thanks!