On the subject of Perlin noise, I saw this blog post which elaborates on how it can be used to procedurally generate terrain, again by projecting the texture values into 3D (I believe games like Minecraft use similar tactics as well). It's really cool to me how sampling textures can also be used in a way that arguably has nothing to do with textures, but because existing technology is well optimized for this sort of task (and because it helps with visualization), a task like creating 3D heighmaps naturally aligns quite well with the same texture sampling principles.
On the subject of Perlin noise, I saw this blog post which elaborates on how it can be used to procedurally generate terrain, again by projecting the texture values into 3D (I believe games like Minecraft use similar tactics as well). It's really cool to me how sampling textures can also be used in a way that arguably has nothing to do with textures, but because existing technology is well optimized for this sort of task (and because it helps with visualization), a task like creating 3D heighmaps naturally aligns quite well with the same texture sampling principles.