Interpolated Noise Generation

And now we come to the generation of interpolated noise. Interpolated Noise looks much smoother and more natural than raw noise. The basic steps of interpolating noise are simple: to find the value of a coordinate, find the nearest neighbors in the base noise array, and interpolate between them. Here are the steps are visually:

Interpolation

In many cases, you want a smooth transition from one value to the next. This is because, jagged color changes look very unnatural. Enter interpolation. Interpolation is simply a technical term for finding intermediate values between two known values. Interpolation has many applications, from smoothing noise arrays to simple gui fade-ins. Here is what simple interpolation looks like:

Basic Noise Generation

In order to produce more complex (and better looking) noise like Fractal Noise, it is important to have a good, robust noise generator. A noise generator is simply a random number generator that takes a seed and one or more coordinates. It must also produce the same value over and over again for a given set of inputs. Ideally, these values should be between 0 and 1, but that is not required.