This week I finished the new additions that I had planned and started last week, and I began work on a new program that deals with things that I have never used in processing before.

First of all, I added preset options to both ArcWelder and ShapeScape, which I had done to ShapePlane last week. There is a lot of similarity to all of my Sketches, so it was pretty easy to make the changes. Also, I'm considering making myself a universal class that contains everything similar between them, so I don't have to copy and paste between them all.

After I finished with that, I browsed through Pinterest and the Design Cuts Market to get some inspiration of what to do next. I found little that I hadn't seen before, nothing was really popping out to me, until I recalled something that I have used in the past in Unity, creating a game that required random terrain generation. Perlin Noise is used to generate most height maps you'll find in video games, from a distance it may look like the static noise you'd find on a TV, but Perlin Noise is less random; all of the pixels are grayscale, ranging from 0 to 1, and with similar values closer together. In regular noise, you could find a 0 and a 1 right next to each other, but in Perlin Noise, depending on the scale, you would find a 0, then a 0.1, 0.2, etc.

In a video game, this translates into making mountains and valleys; the number values are used as heights rather than colors. In Processing, I could use this for so many new generative sketches, and in nearly all of my old ones. For instance, since noise relies on a seed, and using the same seed produces the same noise pattern, I could use it to "remove" the randomness from all of my sketches; entering the same seed would produce the same image. Noise could also be used to create textures, landscapes (2D or 3D), Photoshop Brushes, etc, and I plan on looking into all of those applications in the near future.