Soft Linear was value noise with a quintic fade between two lattice
values per axis. That fade has zero slope across every lattice line and
at every lattice point, so the noise's contours met the lattice at right
angles and flattened around its points. The turbulent fold (1 - |s|) and
high contrast turned that into a visible square grid at each layer's cell
size (Turbulent Basic, Contrast 140, Brightness -35: gradients 1.3x as
strong along the axes as along the diagonals; Spline 1.1x).
Soft Linear is now linear interpolation softened by a one-cell box
filter, i.e. the uniform quadratic B-spline over the 3 x 3 lattice values
around the nearest one (evolution still fades between two slices): smooth
everywhere, with half the neighbours' difference as its slope on lattice
lines, and cheaper than Spline (9 taps instead of 16). Averaging
lowers the noise's spread, so a fixed gain about mid-grey restores the
quintic fade's variance and existing projects keep their contrast and
brightness (issue settings: mean 0.356 -> 0.362, std 0.147 -> 0.152,
axis bias 1.28 -> 1.05).
Only Fractal / Turbulent Noise's Soft Linear changes: generate's
value_noise and its other callers are untouched. noise3 now shares
generate's lattice hash and fade instead of copying them. The GPU
kernels (pointwise Fractal Noise and fxn_fractal) call the same
soft_linear_noise. No golden hashes pin these cases.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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