It isn’t until near the very end of the first book of George R. R. Martins’ “A Game of Thrones” series that honest to goodness dragons appear. Before that, it seems to be more or less a story about some rather dysfunctional medieval kingdoms, and maybe bad weather.
But then the dragons show up, and suddenly it’s all a lot less Barbara Tuchman and a lot more J. R. Tolkien.
Today I looked around at the shaders people have been writing with WebGL. Things are kind of boring, until you get to the shaders that mix it up with procedural noise. And then suddenly the visual results get really interesting.
I looked at various peoples’ shader code for noise, and to my surprise I saw copyright notices with assorted peoples’ names — both for the original noise function and for simplex noise. Which is weird because both of those are my algorithms. So I’m not really sure exactly what those copyrights are for.
In any case, it feels as though shaders with noise function are like those dragons in “A Game of Thrones”. When you see them, things become a lot less like an academic exercise and a lot more about cool shapes and images.
Except in this case, in a weird way, it seems that I am the dragon!
There are 3 Nodes dedicated to Perlin Noise at vvvv! It can be combined with webGL as well. Before I knew you, i thought “Perlin” comes from the german word perlig (engl. pearly) and would therefore make a pearly effect on surfaces, ha. http://vvvv.org/documentation/perlin-%282d%29, http://vvvv.org/documentation/perlin-%28ex9.texture-source%29
– Asli
Does it feel good to be the dragon? Hope so. I’ve used your algorithms almost every day of my career.
Yeah it feels good. Except for, um, you know, the bad breath in the morning… 😉