That was the point where I started looking for ways to create organic looking materials. I knew what I wanted — techniques that would stop things from looking like they came out of a computer.
Just using random numbers didn’t work. If you make everything a random color, you just get speckled noise, which isn’t really what most natural materials look like.
So I started looking for ways to create coherent noise. I started looking at things like the bumpy surface of dried paint on walls, the shapes of sand dunes, the texture of avocadoes. All of those things consist of random bumps, but the bumps are all pretty much the same size.
I started to look for ways to make something that looked like that, because if I could create bumps of one size, then I could mix bumps at different scale to create many sorts of textures. Kind of like mixing different musical notes to make chords.
And that led me to create the 3D noise function. But that wasn’t the Aha moment.
More tomorrow.