Okay so I have been trying to make perlin noise, fractal noise to be specific, with mixed success. What I do is I fill 5 arrays with white noise, basically just floating point values. Each array is four times as big as the last array. Then what I do is add each of these arrays together. What I have gathered from my extensive research is that putting this into a picture with a gray-scale should produce something like Pic One, but what i'm getting out is Pic Two. I really have no understanding of what i'm doing wrong, and I would appreciate some clarity and explanation on the subject.
Some sites I'v read through.
Edit:
I know for sure it has nothing to do with the how i'm rendering the noise. I'm also fairly sure that how I add the noise is not an issue.
Edit 2:
I have one more question. In some implementations I see that they interpolate between 4 gradients, and I understand how to get the value using dot product and whatnot. (Talking about 2 dimensional noise). My question is what would the difference be between using gradient vectors at each point or using a value representing height? Is there one that is better than the other? Thanks.