Noise

Overview

The heart of procedural pattern generation. Almost every natural variation—stone, grass, clouds, water—starts here. In addition to coloring and using it directly, it is especially important to connect it as input to other nodes, such as a height map, mask, or warp source.

Usage tips

• Choose mode first: blocky random variation → White; clouds or mottling → Smooth/Perlin; paving stones or scales → Cellular. When unsure, use Perlin.
• scale is the pattern size in pixels. Start around one-quarter to one-eighth of the canvas. For a 64px canvas, 8–16 is easy to work with.
• For batch production, changing only seed produces a new variant. Turning it into a variable makes batching easy.
• Go-to downstream uses: map input of slope_blur; coloring with gradient_map; warp source for displace or directional_warp; mask creation with threshold.

Common pitfalls

• The pattern is so fine it looks like static: scale is too small. Raise it to at least about one-eighth of the canvas size.
• A seam appears when tiled: seamless is OFF. When turned ON, note that scale rounds to a nearby value.
• Cellular does not look like paving stones: set cell_style to Edges for boundary lines. Lowering jitter makes the stone arrangement more regular.

Modes

• White (white noise)
  • Outputs random blocks about scale pixels wide, not independent noise per pixel.
  • Increasing scale makes the blocks larger.
• Smooth (smooth noise)
  • Uses interpolated value noise for smooth, cloud-like variation.
  • Layer detail with octaves and persistence.
• Perlin (Perlin noise)
  • Gradient noise that creates natural variation with flow.
  • It has more direction than Smooth and suits terrain, clouds, and water.
• Cellular (cellular noise)
  • Cell-shaped Worley noise.
  • Cells: Color A at each cell center, moving toward Color B at the edge; suited to bubbles and scales.
  • Edges: thin Color A lines at cell boundaries; suited to mortar in paving stones.
  • Lower jitter approaches a regular grid pattern.

Seamless output

Turn seamless ON to tile the generated image in every direction without seams. Use this as a base for tile textures such as stone, grass, or water.

• When ON, scale rounds to a nearby value so a whole number of pattern repetitions fits within the image.
• Connect Tile Preview to inspect the tiled appearance.

Notes

• color_a and color_b are the colors interpolated from noise values 0–1.
• White produces scale-sized random blocks rather than per-pixel white noise; Smooth / Perlin suit clouds and mottling; Cellular suits paving stones and scales.
• scale controls pattern size. Smaller values produce finer patterns.

Examples

1. Build a base for clouds or grime with Smooth / Perlin.
2. Build a paving-stone tile base with Cellular (edges) + seamless, then inspect it in Tile Preview.
3. Pass colored noise through Palette Quantize or Dither to make a pixel-art asset.

Related nodes

• gradient_map — the go-to next step for coloring grayscale noise
• slope_blur — use this node as a height map and smear a pattern
• threshold — convert noise to a black-and-white mask
• motion — when you need numeric noise for animation rather than an image