Background on Perlin noise

Here we provide a background on Perlin noise and explain the Perlin noise algorithm in detail.

A bit of history

Perlin noise is probably the most popular algorithm for generating random textures. Perlin noise was invented in 1985 by Ken Perlin, a professor at NYU and among other things was used for creating animations for several movies including Oscar winning Tron and many others. Here is the URL to a talk by Ken Perlin, detailing what has been achieved using Perlin noise: http://www.noisemachine.com/talk1/index.html.

The big advantage of using Perlin noise is that even though it is random, the pixels next to each other are still correlated – just the way they are in natural textures.

Perlin noise algorithm

Noise is a function that maps any point in a one, two, three, or more dimensional space into a real number. Usually we are only interested in noise that cannot grow infinitely high or low, so without the loss of generality we can assume that our noise maps a point...