By femdev on Skatehive
Learn Creative Coding (#12) - Noise Without a Library: Implementing Perlin Noise We've been using noise() since episode 4 like a magic wand. Point it at a coordinate, get a smooth random value back. Beautiful. But -- allez, what's actually happening inside that function? Why is it smooth? Why is it different from random()? And why do people keep saying "Perlin noise" like it's a religion? Today we build the whole thing from scratch. No p5, no libraries. Just math, a permutation table, and about 50 lines of code. By the end of this episode, you'll not only understand what noise() does -- you'll have your own implementation that you can customize in ways p5 doesn't let you. (And honestly, once you see how simple the core idea is, you'll wonder why it took you this long to look inside. I know I did. There's something deeply satisfying about opening a black box and finding it's just math and cleverness :-) If you haven't done episodes 9 through 11 yet, go back and do them first -- we're bu