Following Procedure

What does three hours of work get you? A Mersenne Twister, the above image, and the revelation that, according to this book, Perlin is blissfully unaware of the finer points of Knuth shuffling. (This should not be construed as an attack on the rest of Perlin's work, which is responsible for much general awesomeness in subsequent cinematography.)

Graphics geeks will recognize this immediately; for the other 99.99% of humanity, it's an example of Perlin noise. This is the first intelligible thing to come out of my graphics term project, in which I plan to explore the exciting world of procedural generation. CG artists will commonly blend several instances of Perlin noise at different frequencies (16 pixels for my test image) to generate more complex textures. These textures are then applied to objects in the scene.

Why did I bother implementing a more complicated random number generator? Let me count the reasons:

• The default implementation uses the full 32-bit integer range and provides an incredibly long period.
  
• I now know exactly how my RNG works. (To be fair, I'm a bit fuzzy on the details of all those bit-shifts...but it feels good to roll your own!)
• Python uses it since Python 2.3, which is a ringing endorsement in my books. (I'm told it has become something of a defacto standard.)

The bottom line is this: I'm going to be generating a lot of random numbers in the course of my project, so I might as well get a good (but still algorithmic - no /dev/urandom reads!) source of them.

Next up: I'll probably tackle Voronoi cell textures and attempt to actually texture-map a procedural texture in OpenGL. I'll also be continuing to post raytracer updates here, so keep posted! For information on the ever-changing state of my team's Real-Time Programming project, see the PsychOS blog.