Playing with Noise
While I have many projects in progress right now, including Amino, Leonardo, getting the TouchPad out the door, and having my first baby (only a few weeks left!); every now and then I just get something into my head and have to code it out. Last night it was noise functions.
Since I've been using little bits of noise in my designs I thought it was high time to really learn how it works. Following code & articles from here and here I've managed to create a simple noise and turbulence generator in Java. With a few different settings you can get textures that range from completely random to something that looks like marble.
pure random grayscale noise
high turblence
medium turbulence + one sinewave
medium turbulence + three sinewaves
It's actually simpler than I thought. Noise is just a bitmap filled with random values from 0 to 1 (or a grayscale value between black and white). Turbulence is created by stacking multiple layers of noise, each stretched to different amounts. Add in a bit of linear smoothing and you get some quality texture. The marble effect is just a turblence texture merged with a sine wave.
Next up, making the noise repeat so we can have tileable textures. Then I might make a simple app to generate noise with various colors. If it all turns out okay I might make a plugin for Leonardo to create your own textures.