← All resources

Perlin It In a Minute!

Auto-discovered

Video / channel Intermediate

OGLDEV

Visit resource ↗

Description

Perlin It In a Minute! is a short OGLDEV YouTube tutorial on procedural terrain heightmaps using Perlin noise in C++ with OpenGL or Vulkan and GLM's noise helpers. The channel demonstrates wiring noise parameters into a floating-point height texture suitable for displacement or vertex sampling.

The walkthrough covers noise scale, octave count, lacunarity, persistence, random seeds, and normalizing output into a zero-to-one range for stable mesh generation. Code snippets show how each parameter changes hill frequency and amplitude in the OGLDEV sample framework.

Viewers should know basic C++, GLM math types, and either OpenGL or Vulkan buffer/texture setup at a beginner-to-intermediate level. The video fits OGLDEV's longer procedural terrain arc but stands alone as a quick Perlin refresher.

It is freely available on YouTube in the channel's characteristic live-coding style. Companion source for the series is published on the OGLDEV site for readers who want to compile the demo locally.

OGLDEV remains a longstanding introductory resource for OpenGL-centric graphics programming; this Perlin-focused clip is often recommended alongside the channel's full terrain modules.