2010
08.14
08.14
In Algorithmic Art , General News | Tags: procedural content, procedural nebulae
I spent the entire day taking a first crack at starfield/nebula shaders. I couldn’t be happier with the results! Below the output of a single shader that consists of thresholded pink noise (stars), and two turbulent-input multifractal perlin noise layers (nebula density/color).
Couple these results with a procedural planet, procedural terrain, and procedural sunset, and things will be starting to look pretty good for project A New Reality!
3 ResponsesLeave a comment ?
How did you get the noise to look wispy? I’m trying to render a nebula but it’s coming out all splotchy.
Distort the inputs of your noise function with other noise functions. If your Perlin noise function is N(x,y), then play around with things like N(x+c*N(x,y),y+c*N(x,y)). Where c is some constant factor that determines the “wispyness” of the noise. Note that you should play around with the parameters of the inner noise functions (octaves, lacunarity, etc).
Just be creative with compositing noise functions until you get something interesting
Wow, that looks awesome. I thank you as I yoinked your technique for my own use (I’ve been looking for a few days now how to do this exact thing). I’d never have thought of recursively using Perlin noise like that. Very clever.
Its unfortunate that my noise(x,y) function is in pure AS3 and not a native function (the native bitmap fill funtion is terrible anyway, not returning a value (0-255) greater than 175). So it’s taking 7.6 seconds to generate a 550×400 pixel image. Plus another 4.1 for the stars (if I instead use a native .fill it takes 250 ms, but doesn’t generate the colors I want: saturated red, yellow, cyan, and white, instead I only get saturated red and white).