I'm having difficulty understanding a lot of the highly mathematical papers available online describing how Perlin noise generation works, and I'm wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a more accessible introduction. I am looking to use Perlin noise in an application to create 2D textures.
A:
Look at the book Texturing and Modeling, A Procedural Approach, starting in page 67 there's a nice description and source code for gradient noises, perlin noise is just another gradient noise.
There's also a implementation in GPU Gems 2.
Perlin noise itself doesn't use much advanced math, you only need to know about linear interpolation, lattices and random values.
Matias Valdenegro
2010-07-21 21:48:23