Turbulence (fractal noise)
Layered procedural noise used to make clouds and smoke or to drive organic warps, ripples, and rough textures.
See it
What it is
Turbulence is layered procedural noise used as texture or as data that drives another effect. SVG's feTurbulence primitive generates either smoother fractalNoise or the more folded turbulence variant, with frequency, octave count, and seed controlling the pattern.
Typical uses include clouds, smoke, stone, paper grain, or an organic displacement map without loading an image. In shaders, related fractal noise is often sampled over moving coordinates to create drifting flow.
Gotcha: changing the seed replaces the whole pattern, so animating it usually flickers instead of flowing. Move the sampling coordinates or change frequency gradually, keep octave counts modest, and add tiling deliberately when a repeating surface must loop.
Ask AI for it
Generate an organic displacement source with SVG feTurbulence using type='fractalNoise', baseFrequency='0.012', numOctaves='3', and a fixed seed. Feed its red and green channels into feDisplacementMap at a scale of 18, and animate a coordinate offset for slow drift without changing the seed.