> Sorry, I'm a math dummy, but what is the advantage of
> 4 dimensional noise?
> Or is it only useful for animations?


Well, It's not really usefull for anything other than an animation. The
advantage is that you're able to animate textures with it.

Consider a plane that uses normal{bozo} to simulate wavy water. If you want
to animate the water over time, you can merely translate the normal pattern
vertically (normal{bozo translate clock*y}).

However, now pretend you have an unrealistic cube of water floating in
space. If you want to animate its waviness, you could try translating the
texture vertically - but that would only cause the intended look on the top
and bottom faces of the cube. The other faces would show the waves moving
up, but not changing otherwise.

With 4D noise, you can move the pattern through the 4th dimension, and it
changes uniformly *everywhere* in 3D space.

 - Slime
[ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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