It's been well over 20 years since Ken Perlin first invented his noise. Has anybody managed to make a faster kind of 3D noise generator with properties close to Perlin's (procedural, natural-looking grouping, reduced banding, regular feature size, etc)?
I'm trying to build a procedural world generator but currently Perlin just isn't cutting it. I admit my implementation isn't the best it could be right now, but if I'm about to rewrite it anyway I wondered if there was a better algorithm available.
You want Simplex Noise.
There's a good explanation here. Apparently Ken Perlin's example implementation is not the most easy to understand code.