Fragments Early Access — Noise

Thanks for a great start!

I'm really overwhelmed (positive) with the response I've had for early access - thank you so much for joining early and helping to shape the final product. I really appreciate it! It also revealed there were quite a few bugs that needed to be fixed, so I've been busy smashing through those along with your help especially on the github side. It's been great to have you all involved! Now I'm making sure new content is getting added as quickly as possible - all while recovering from being sick for the past week! Ahh, the life of a parent with a young kid at daycare!

The Noise technique

Speaking of new content, the first new technique deep dive is now live: Noise. I took a similar approach to this one as I did with the Domain Repetition technique, where I cover some of the unique aspects of noise and how to use it to create interest and complexity in your work.

A lot of the sketches I've created use noise in some way - either completely basing the sketch around noise, or using it to enhance different aspects of the sketch.

In this technique, I go through some of the different noise functions available in Fragments, and how to use them as both a foundational technique (ie: noise creates the dominant visual effect), as well as how to use them to enhance your work, so how you might use them to perturb values. In general, I look at noise as being a great way to enhance your work, or to find new and interesting outputs for more generic things.

I go over using both procedural (noise from a function), and texture-based noise (noise from a texture - shocker!) and how to use each in TSL, along with pluses and minuses of each approach. This is something you can lean into to improve performance, or to create some more consistent patterns with your noise.

The experiments section goes into a bit more depth around using noise in novel ways - things like creating fractal patterns, using noise to mask and blend, and gradients with noise. There's so much flexibility with this technique, and I'm really excited to see what you all create with it.

The Slate series

As part of this, I've created a new series of sketches exploring the use of layered noise (Fractional Brownian Motion for the most part) to create some really interesting, organic and textural art. I love how these have turned out - it's a great showcase for the power of noise, but also how you can layer different techniques to create something unique.

New Utilities and Boilerplate projects

I've added some more utilities to the collection:

• 2 new textural functions that you can use to give texture to your work
• Fractional Brownian Motion (FBM) functions that you can use to create more complex noise patterns

The boilerplate projects have also been updated to include all of the new utilities, you can find those ones here:

• R3F Boilerplate Project
• Vanilla Boilerplate Project

The plan for next week

The next technique deep dive will go live next Wednesday. It will be all about Pixel Sorting. This is a really fun one that dives pretty deeply into using compute shaders and some other more advanced techniques to create those awesome looking glitchy sorts of effects. Like the Flow Field technique, this will focus on creating a reusable component that you can extend and modify to create your own unique outputs.

Early access details

Because I was asked quite a lot about it over the last week, here are some answers to some of the most common questions:

• Early access is live now and closes October 1st
• There is a 40% discount for the entire early access period
• A full technique preview is available here: Geometric Shapes

If you have any other questions, send me a message on X (Twitter)!