| Submitted by , posted on 18 January 2001 |

Image Description, by This is a new fractal (I think) that I have named "Blob map". It is a type of perlin noise function, but the idea came from having to do materials in our terrain (so that we can get things like waterfalls to occur naturally). I set about devising a fractal that had equal probability of any material being at any location, but had the smooth edges and irregularities associated with a perlin noise (terrain) funtion.
The fractal just returns the index of the current highest perlin noise fractal, so programming it was easy, but actually thinking about how to do it took some time. I initially tried to make an N-dimensional perlin noise function, and just disregard any plots that fell outside an N-dimensional triangle (so that the probability was always equivalent), but reading the tutorial on Barrycentric coordinates, i prooved to myself that to plot any point inside an N-dimensional triangle, all you needed was to supply scalars to N-dimensional verts, and find out which corner the result was closest to. Now simplifying this to a case of strongest scalar wins wasn't a big deal, so that is why i now use this highest perlin function returns its index.
If you want the source code or a demo, I have put them on my operations site. (this is the organisation web site) http://omnisentient.vcollective.org/engine/downloads/index.html

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