Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

Perlin noise is a pseudo-random gradient texture, developed by Ken Perlin beginning with his work on the 1982 movie Tron. It continues to be a great tool to create textures and dynamic elements. The function generates a continuous string of values in any number of dimensions. Although it was initially developed to build textures it can be very useful for many other things such as particle motion. Noise is generated by a series oscillations over a variety of frequencies, similar to an audio signal.

Processing supports Perlin noise in up to three dimensions and can be implemented by calling the noise function with the parameters for the coordinate. I’ve been playing with using Three dimensional noise to create an animated force field or flow field in which particles move and thought I’d build a little tutorial to demonstrate some useful applications.

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Quartz composer is a great tool for audio visualization for two main reasons. First, it renders incredibly quickly and smoothly. Unlike processing, which i usually prefer for its flexibility, which would quickly start dropping frames if you try to create many of the effects Quartz Composer has. The second thing that makes it great for live performances is the fact that the script can be edited live while it is rendering. Most environments would require the script to be saved, recompiled, restarted to make any changes. This is also made easier by the very clear visual environment.

The drawback of course is there are only a limited number of predefined functions which can be used, but there is still some room for creativity. The program is still very new, so I have some hope for its future. Another drawback is it’s only for mac and only the newest operating systems (10.4, 10.5) at that, but if you have a mac, you’ve already got it. Check out my previous post on QC for more info on that. Read On »

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