OpenSimplex noise

N-dimensional gradient noise function

The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline . Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted.
Find sources: "OpenSimplex noise" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2016) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Abstract composition in 3D generated with the OpenSimplex noise generation algorithm.

OpenSimplex noise is an n-dimensional (up to 4D) gradient noise function that was developed in order to overcome the patent-related issues surrounding simplex noise, while likewise avoiding the visually-significant directional artifacts characteristic of Perlin noise.

The algorithm shares numerous similarities with simplex noise, but has two primary differences:

Whereas simplex noise starts with a hypercubic honeycomb and squashes it down the main diagonal in order to form its grid structure,^[1] OpenSimplex noise instead swaps the skew and inverse-skew factors and uses a stretched hypercubic honeycomb. The stretched hypercubic honeycomb becomes a simplectic honeycomb after subdivision.^[2] This means that 2D Simplex and 2D OpenSimplex both use different orientations of the triangular tiling, but whereas 3D Simplex uses the tetragonal disphenoid honeycomb, 3D OpenSimplex uses the tetrahedral-octahedral honeycomb.^[2]
OpenSimplex noise uses a larger kernel size than simplex noise. The result is a smoother appearance at the cost of performance, as additional vertices need to be determined and factored into each evaluation.^[2]

OpenSimplex has a variant called "SuperSimplex" (or OpenSimplex2S), which is visually smoother. "OpenSimplex2F" is identical to the original SuperSimplex.

References

[edit ]

^ Ken Perlin, Noise hardware. In Real-Time Shading SIGGRAPH Course Notes (2001), Olano M., (Ed.). (pdf)
^ ^a ^b ^c Spirit of Iron: Simplectic Noise Michael Powell's blog