15.8. Summary

This chapter introduced noise, an incredibly useful function for adding irregularity to procedural shaders. After a brief description of the mathematical definition of this function, we used it as the basis for shaders that simulated clouds, turbulent flow, marble, granite, and wood. The noise function is available as a built-in function in the OpenGL Shading Language. Noise functions can also be created with user-defined shader functions or textures. However it is implemented, noise can increase the apparent realism of an image or an animation by adding imperfections, complexity, and an element of apparent randomness.