Texture Space Noise Blur

[WAS]

Something a bit different. Method borrowed from blender community.

This is really only good for texturing, as the way Terragen handles terrain means it will severely abuse the noise level in geometry, trying to be as exacting as possible. Maybe disabling some adaptive features would help but I don't know.

This method naturally relies on noise scale, and AA being able to smooth it out.

[Dune]

Smart. Another way of smoothing is by warping and smoothing that out by smoothing filter.

[WAS]

I'd love to see an example of that. As far as I know, warping will warp it through it's used space, so Y wouldn't align up with the Y you used. This method is similar, but it's the texture space itself warped around, and then the noise applied over that at same Y as it would without any effects.

For example you could use a non modulated voronoi diff scalar for displacement, and use a modulated noise blur one for texturing so its more natural and smooth.

[Dune]

It's not working like your example, but was good enough for me. Would be great if there would be a variable for extra smoothing of the cell blues too.

[WAS]

Interesting. I don't really see any effect cause the noise is smoothed away, so if you disable the fractal warp it's the same voronoi. But, I did get your version to work the way I do it, with unclamped variation noise PF displacement as a warper. This allows you to noise blur any shader in texture space, it seems.

The neat thing about this method, is you can play with the lead-in, or other scales / settings for interesting blur effects.

[Dune]

I've been experimenting some more, but I think I have to admit my defeat regarding the use of blur/smooth for displacements. But indeed, for colors, your method is very useful.