Worley noise, also called Voronoi noise and cellular noise, is a noise function introduced by Steven Worley in 1996. Worley noise is an extension of the Voronoi diagram that outputs a real value at a given coordinate that corresponds to the Distance of the nth nearest seed (usually n=1) and the seeds are distributed evenly through the region. Worley noise is used to create procedural textures. Worley noise of Euclidean distance is differentiable and continuous everywhere except on the edges of the Voronoi diagram of the set of seeds and on the location of the seeds.

Basic algorithm

The algorithm chooses random points in space (2- or 3-dimensional) and then for every location in space takes the distances Fn to the nth-closest point (e.g. the second-closest point) and uses combinations of those to control color information (note that Fn+1 > Fn). More precisely: