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January 7, 2003

Perlin noise in Shockwave: Can't

Perlin noise in Shockwave: Can't believe I missed this when it was originally released on DesDev, but it got rotated into a spotlight today... Andrew Phelps shows fractal noise generation in Lingo. (Where the Flash Player has a Drawing API for procedural vectors, Shockwave offers additional procedural bitmap and procedural 3D generation.) Ken Perlin introduced a whole range of realistic image synethesis techniques when he piled randomness atop randomness back in 1984 or so. Matter of fact, I finally got a job here at Macromedia in part because I used Perlin techniques in writing RenderMan shaders for MacroMind 3D. Anyway, I'm glad Andrew points the way here towards ways to calculate natural-looking textures at runtime, optionally with user interaction... more cool stuff!

Posted by John Dowdell at January 7, 2003 3:49 PM