Fabrice NEYRET - Maverick team, LJK, at INRIA-Montbonnot (Grenoble)
Procedural
noise like Perlin
noise allows movies and video game artists to generate on the fly
very detailed natural-looking stochastic textures, or even volumetric
density fields. Alas they are uneasy to control finely. In
particular, many real-world textures are anisotropic (see images
above), which requires to specify varying stretch amount
and direction everywhere.
Some way more costly methods like Gabor
noise give more control, but generally
in
the aim of generating homogeneous fields, unlike the examples above.
And when it come to animation ( e.g. solar flares, exploding nebula )
nothing usable
is
available.
In
the purpose of synthesizing in real-time animated large stochastic
structures as above, either
2D
or volumetric, we
propose to explore a mix of Perlin and Gabor models, taking the best
of each, in a spirit cousin
to
Local
Random-Phase Noise : The
idea is to replace the Perlin wavelet at nodes of the hierarchical
grid by Gabor kernels. One difficulties is to preserve properties
during animation. For instance, motion along the direction of the
Gabor sine is trivial, by animating the phase, but the orthogonal
direction is way more challenging. Early
tests can be seen in shadertoy.
Culture in procedural textures, statistics, signal processing, would be a plus.
C/C++ and/or GLSL shading language or equivalent ( e.g., cf online example above ).