Noise TOP vs Noise POP scaling

POPs
1

Hi, I’m playing around with some old Noise TOP-based feedback systems, re-creating them in Noise POP as a practice. In the process I’ve found that the scaling seems to be different between Noise TOP and POP.

In this example, I take a 1x1 XY Plane POP and apply noise to just the z-position. In parallel, I create a 1x1 XY grid of points with two ramp TOPs and use noise to make a z position.

To achieve a similar “peakiness” in the z-position, I need to set the Noise TOP period to 4 for a Noise POP period of 1. How should I understand this difference?

20251125 - Noise TOP POP comparison.toe (4.6 KB)

image
image790×724 118 KB

2

They’ve been designed a bit differently. The Noise TOP’s period is adjusted so the ‘default’ gives a bit more variation across the image by default. However this is less ‘correct’, it’s been around for 20 years so hard to change now. The Noise POP went with the more correct value, where a period of 1 tends to do one ‘cycle’ of the noise.

2 Likes
3

thanks for the insights, it’s fun to hear about little historical things like this…