After reading peachykeen's answer and doing some (more) own research in the internet, I have found the following solution to work for me.
With my implementation of Perlin noise, using a value range of [0.0 .. 1.0] for the lightning path nodes work best, passing the value (double) M / (double) N for node M to the Perlin noise function.
To have a noise function F' return the same value for node 0 and node N-1, the following formula can be applied: F'(M) = ((M - N) * F(N) + N * F (N - M)) / M. In order to have the lightning path offsets begin and end with 0, you simply need to subtract F'(0) from all lightning path offsets after having computed the path.
To randomize the lightning path, before computing the offsets for each path node, a random offset R can be computed and added to the values passed to the noise function, so that a node's offset O = F'(N+R). To animate a lightning, two lightning paths need to be computed (start and end frame), and then each path vertex has to be lerped between its start and end position. Once the end frame has been reached, the end frame becomes the start frame and a new end frame is computed. For a 3D path, for each path node N two offset vectors can be computed that are perpendicular to the path at node N and each other, and can be scaled with two 1D Perlin noise values to lerp the node position from start to end frame position. That may be cheaper than doing 3D Perlin noise and works quite well in my application.
Here is my implementation of standard 1D Perlin noise as a reference (some stuff is virtual because I am using this as base for improved Perlin noise, allowing to use standard or improved Perlin noise in a strategy pattern application. The code has been simplified somewhat as well to make it more concise for publishing it here):
Header file:
#ifndef __PERLIN_H
#define __PERLIN_H
class CPerlin {
private:
int m_randomize;
protected:
double m_amplitude;
double m_persistence;
int m_octaves;
public:
virtual void Setup (double amplitude, double persistence, int octaves, int randomize = -1);
double ComputeNoise (double x);
protected:
double LinearInterpolate (double a, double b, double x);
double CosineInterpolate (double a, double b, double x);
double CubicInterpolate (double v0, double v1, double v2, double v3, double x);
double Noise (int v);
double SmoothedNoise (int x);
virtual double InterpolatedNoise (double x);
};
#endif //__PERLIN_H
Implementation:
#include <math.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include "perlin.h"
#define INTERPOLATION_METHOD 1
#ifndef Pi
# define Pi 3.141592653589793240
#endif
inline double CPerlin::Noise (int n) {
n = (n << 13) ^ n;
return 1.0 - ((n * (n * n * 15731 + 789221) + 1376312589) & 0x7fffffff) / 1073741824.0;
}
double CPerlin::LinearInterpolate (double a, double b, double x) {
return a * (1.0 - x) + b * x;
}
double CPerlin::CosineInterpolate (double a, double b, double x) {
double f = (1.0 - cos (x * Pi)) * 0.5;
return a * (1.0 - f) + b * f;
}
double CPerlin::CubicInterpolate (double v0, double v1, double v2, double v3, double x) {
double p = (v3 - v2) - (v0 - v1);
double x2 = x * x;
return v1 + (v2 - v0) * x + (v0 - v1 - p) * x2 + p * x2 * x;
}
double CPerlin::SmoothedNoise (int v) {
return Noise (v) / 2 + Noise (v-1) / 4 + Noise (v+1) / 4;
}
int FastFloor (double v) { return (int) ((v < 0) ? v - 1 : v; }
double CPerlin::InterpolatedNoise (double v) {
int i = FastFloor (v);
double v1 = SmoothedNoise (i);
double v2 = SmoothedNoise (i + 1);
#if INTERPOLATION_METHOD == 2
double v0 = SmoothedNoise (i - 1);
double v3 = SmoothedNoise (i + 2);
return CubicInterpolate (v0, v1, v2, v3, v - i);
#elif INTERPOLATION_METHOD == 1
return CosineInterpolate (v1, v2, v - i);
#else
return LinearInterpolate (v1, v2, v - i);
#endif
}
double CPerlin::ComputeNoise (double v) {
double total = 0, amplitude = m_amplitude, frequency = 1.0;
v += m_randomize;
for (int i = 0; i < m_octaves; i++) {
total += InterpolatedNoise (v * frequency) * amplitude;
frequency *= 2.0;
amplitude *= m_persistence;
}
return total;
}
void CPerlin::Setup (double amplitude, double persistence, int octaves, int randomize) {
m_amplitude = (amplitude > 0.0) ? amplitude : 1.0;
m_persistence = (persistence > 0.0) ? persistence : 2.0 / 3.0;
m_octaves = (octaves > 0) ? octaves : 6;
m_randomize = (randomize < 0) ? (rand () * rand ()) & 0xFFFF : randomize;
}
