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I would like to know why Perlin noise is still so popular today after Simplex came out. Simplex noise was made by Ken Perlin himself and it was suppose to take over his old algorithm which was slow for higher dimensions and with better quality (no visible artifacts).
Simplex noise came out in 2001 and over those 10 years I've only seen people talk of Perlin noise when it comes to generating heightmaps for terrains, creating procedural textures, et cetera.
Could anyone help me out, is there some downside of Simplex noise? I heard rumors that Perlin noise is faster when it comes to 1D and 2D noise, but I don't know if it's true or not.
Thanks!
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simplex noise looks worse imho, and lots of people think it looks "increasingly bad" in higher dimensions. I'd still recommend it over perlin for most applications, as most won't be using just raw simplex but octaves of it which looks roughly the same as octaves of perlin and is significantly faster for octaves.
Minecraft is specifically using Perlin noise calculations, like the kind you'd use to create a rough-looking texture for a 3D model. It starts out on a very broad level, painting a basic topographical map, and adds "noise" through finer terrain details like lakes, shrubbery and animals.
Perlin noise is a procedural texture primitive, a type of gradient noise used by visual effects artists to increase the appearance of realism in computer graphics. The function has a pseudo-random appearance, yet all of its visual details are the same size.
Gaussian noise is the closest match to the classic Perlin Noises from before Designer 2017 2.1, despite the name. See also the newer Perlin Noise for a newer, slightly different version of the classic.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
See if you can find anyone telling you why Simplex is better. "It's faster and extends to multiple dimensions" and "simplex noise attempts to reduce the complexity of higher dimensional noise functions" were what I found. Most of us work in 2 or 3 dimensions, maybe 4 if we're lucky enough to be doing something with time.
I think its fair to say there is little enough real-time usage of Perlin that is too slow to handle, that for most purposes standard Perlin noise is sufficient. In pre-renderings (such as used in the movie industry) time isn't really important since renderings are slow anyway; and in real-time simulations, we have enough ways to reduce the scope of ongoing processing that it's unlikely you're going to be generating massive noise maps every few nano/milliseconds -- that's just basic real-time optimisation.
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I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was simply because of the name. You have to choose between Perlin noise and Simplex noise. The latter is newer and has some advantages. But, you know, it sounds like the 'simple' version of the two. I'll go with the complexer one; noise is supposed to be complex, isn't it?
People tend to be rather irrational.
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