mostly a codeBlog

In regards to my previous Perlin Flowfield post, it was a bit strange because I could simply not remember the basics about Perlin noise. Yes, as my colleague I falsely believed Perlin to be the evil brother of Merlin.

I have previously used Perlin noise in Processing, it is a bit different in some of the aspects of how you “access” it. In Processing you sort of get the values representing the noise iteration, whereas In Flash you actually build a noise Bitmap and read pixels from this to produce numerical noise. I Processing I guess you would do the opposite, i.e. building all the noise values into a bitmap to get something similar to the noise below.

So I build this little app to play around with the parameters and to see how much detail one can get away with, before the calculation load gets to heavy for practical use. The values that can be adjusted below are those that go into the BitmapData.perlinNoise method If you would like to put in more controls or whatever you feel like doing with this small app then: Snatch the entire Flex project here (SDK 3.3), swf included.

I recalled that when dabbling with Perlin noise, a year ago, in Processing I found Ken Perlin’s talk on… well, noise I guess It is very interesting and even though words like permutations and fractals are used to some extend it is mainly an interesting story about this invention.