I like to put plasma effects in my games - they're quite adaptable; you can make
decent clouds, wood effects and various other textures.
Flash makes this very easy with its perlinNoise bitmap function, so I don't
know why they're so little used by others.
Usually I generate them programmatically, to increase variety and save space.
But sometimes you may just want a nice bitmap to process further. In those
circumstances, usually you want an effect between two colours. So here is a
tool to help out. Just tweak the parameters on the right and click 'generate'.
When you see something you like, copy it using whatever screen-copying program
you have to hand.
Parameters:
x scale, y scale
the basic size of the effect.
colour 1, colour 2
the two colours the effect will fade between.
These are given in hexadecimal format, that is, RrGgBb, where Rr, Gg and Bb are
red, green and blue, two hexadecimal digits each.
octaves
how fractaline the effect will be.
width, height
how big the bitmap will be. If smaller than 640x480,
the image is tiled 2x2 across and down, so you can see how it repeats. This also
makes cutting out a seamless tile much easier (in combination with stitch).
stitch
if set, the system will attempt to create a seamless tile,
useful for repeating patterns.