Perlin Noise and Filters

This is a nifty little trick I stumbled into. Running a Perlin noise field through random filters turns out to create interesting textures. I mean, they're not excellent. But they do show quite a bit of diversity, and considering the simplicity of the method, I'm quite pleased.

The filters are functions that take in 3x3 pixels, add them together with random weights, and output a single pixel value.

I also experimented with bigger filters (5x5 and 7x7), but the results just looked like regular Perlin noise.

You might say that these kind of just reflect the underlying Perlin noise, but not really. In fact, all these textures are made with the same seed for the Perlin noise and still they look nothing alike. This means that the interaction between noise and filter is what creates the effect.

The only frustrating thing is that there are some horizontal/vertical artifacts here and there. I also wish I could make sure that the textures were tiling.

I think this is fine for now. I'll keep this project in mind, and next time I need some terrain textures, I'll come back and fix these issues.