Tron

February 27th, 2009 | Richard Almond

Well I watched Tron the other night after coming across some nice work by Anthony Mattox, which experimented with Perlin Noise. Quite possibly the worst film ever, but some fricken sweet artwork.

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.

Processing seems to be the way forward to achieve many of the effects I want, looks like I have some learning to do…