Looping Fractal Noise + Modifiers When Baking To Video

How-To
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Hi guys,

I’ve tried my best to figure this out on my own but not getting anywhere.

Basically i have a plane that is being deformed by fractal noise, and i want the noise to loop so that once it’s baked to video it will loop seamlessly.

It appears to loop seamlessly in the viewport but not when rendered to video, any ideas? Or is it even possible?

Cheers

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Hey Nick,

Fractal Noise is inherently random, so it can’t loop. The reason the fractal noise is fine in notch is because after the end of the timeline, notch is setup to “continue” using an internal time for that node (you can change this with the Update Time Mode).

If you want to make a fractal noise loop… you’ll probably have to render it to video, then blend the ending with the beginning, or any of the ways to set up looping projects you’ll be used to in other tools.

Thanks,

Ryan

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Hi Ryan,

That’s a shame, it’s possible in other programs at a fraction of the cost. I’ll be adding this to a growing feature request list. I can’t help but feel this software is primarily aimed at live performance, and leaving those baking to video in the dark.

Thanks for letting me know,

Nick

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4

I second @DigitalPunkGFX on this. Fractal Noise can be looped in After Effects. I’m sure Adobe’s solution is something sneaky, like a clever blending method using their Animation Cycles and Evolution parameters. Would be lovely to have this ability in Notch.

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Hi, many noises do not have loop point - in this case I just animate the transform (x, y, z) - in this way I could make it a perfect loop. (Another problem is that if you don’t have a random seed and still need to vary, then the transform can help again)

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Hello all, has a solution been found or added regarding this topic ?

Simon

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Could you normalise the noise back to solid white or solid black at the start and end of your noise, render that out as a video to use as the loopable source, but overlapping the start and end with blend mode, so it kinda fades between one and the other. then use a video loader and that new rendered loop instead of the fractal noise generator?

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Here’s a super over-engineered solution I quickly knocked up using TimeStretch:

FractalNoiseLooper.dfx (28.4 KB)

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Technically Perlin and Simplex noise at least are (or can be) pseudo-random. For Perlin/Simplex this means that the noise you get are interpolations between set random values in a field of n-dimensions. To make it loopable, you’d have to loop the positional input value of the noise generator. In a two dimensional field (or array) this is commonly done by feeding the coordinates of an ellipse to read and interpolate between the values of the array. That way you get back to the start noise-wise, and it will loop seamlessly. As this gets a bit low-level for the Notch workflow, I can understand why it isn’t a possibility. To toggle looping of noise though, should be a matter of wrapping the time source in a sin() and cos() function along with a multiplier - but again it could get weird workflow-wise.

I don’t know too much about fractal noise but I’d kind of assume it would work the same way if it “loops” from the start. On the other hand, “fractal” implies recursion which might muddy the waters a bit.

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