MacawRecommendations

Depending on what you need to do, there are a few different settings you might want to use.

Firstly, performance.

Whenever possible, use the shader versions. Generating noise is fairly easily to compute in parallel, meaning that computing noise in GPU land is like an order of magnitude faster than doing it in CPU land. This is probably fine for most things. I do feel it's a little easier to control the result in the CPU versions though, so in some cases you might prefer the result of that in exchange for some speed. Okay, a lot of speed.

Now, amplitude. If your goal is to generate an image, an amplitude of 255 is almost always fine, since that works nicely with the 8-bit values for color channels in an image.

A lower value will result in a darker image.

The generation octaves (smoothness) is rather interesting. Generating noise with only one octave results in pure noise. Two or three octaves gives you something that looks similar to pure noise, but isn't quite.

The noise gets a bit more coherent as you increase the value. This is seven octaves.

For images, I find that using eleven or more octaves is kinda useless, unless you're interested in generating a very large image.

In the shader version of the noise generator, a "smoothness" value of 3ish is probably fine. It's probably worth experimenting with different smoothness values to see which ones look right to you.

The ideal settings for something like terrain may differ. If you use few generations and the amplitude of your terrain is too high, you get something that looks a bit ridiculous.

Ouch.

You can smooth it out by either decreasing the amplitude

or increasing the number of octaves

or both

depending on your current needs.

Have fun!