> Also stereo pics are still cool
Not so much when they're in the stare-into-the-distance configuration rather than cross-your-eyes, and the images are uncomfortably far apart for your inter-ocular distance.
Raytracing a Black Hole
31–35 of 35 posts
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#32I worked at dneg when this very shot was being rendered. From what I remeber there were a few steps to this being rendered, the first part was a massive particle sim. I was a systems engineer, so my job was to keep the system running. That particle sim ate at least 7, if not more hard disks. What ever it did, it destroyed 8tb HDDs. The worst part was we couldn't take that file server offline, as the render needed to…
You're talking about a different black hole render. This is an original project that runs on consumer hardware.
....yes, yes I am.
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#33On a related note, there's a paper by the Interstellar special effects team and Nobel laureate Kip Thorne describing how they rendered the black hole in the film and the tradeoffs they made: https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808
It's amazing that they put so much attention to detail in the same movie where a botched docking maneuver causes an orbiting spacecraft to fall out of the sky, and in which a black hole opens the way for programing mechanical watches from the past.
It is and I hate that movie for it. In theory I should love it, but the disconnect between trying to be realistic and totally ignoring reality, killed it for me. I usually love sci-fi movies, realistic or not. But I mean, if you're going to put so much work into making a main element of the movie seem physically correct and realistic, why wouldn't you put at least a little effort into making the rest of the movie somewhat believable. The movie goes between metaphysical, realistic and action-movie physics every other scene.
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#34And in the coming years astronomers hope to image a black hole directly (in radio wavelengths). The few closest supermassive black holes (in center of galaxies) have their event horizon angular diameters just big enough to be resolved by VLBI (very-long-baseline interferometry). See [3] for details and a simulated image. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope [2] https://eventhorizontelescope.org/…
I believe this is supposed to happen this year, last I heard was this summer but they haven't finished the analysis yet. The data was collected back in April, petabytes of harddrives flown to a central processing location.
That puts the other comment talking about 7x8TB harddrives being devoured in rendering the Interstellar scene a bit into perspective