There’s an interesting discussion related to this in this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z4oy6mnkyW4
Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++
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Re: Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++
#32If you want to avoid opening Twitter (now known as X), here is the link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03808 TLDR “A typical IMAX image has 23 million pixels, and for Interstellar we had to generate many thousand images, so DNGR had to be very efficient. It has 40,000 lines of C++ code and runs across Double Negative’s Linux-based render-farm. Depending on the degree of gravitational lensing in an image, it…
How fast could this run in a modern CPU with a modern GPU?
GPUs are almost irrelevant for VFX work at this scale due to the memory requirements. The render nodes used for Interstellar had 156GB of RAM, and a decade later the biggest GPUs still don't have that much memory (unless you count Macs I suppose but the existing software ecosystem is very CUDA-centric).
Small VFX shops do typically render on GPUs nowadays, but the high end is still dominated by CPU rendering.
Re: Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++
#33ScienceClic did an excellent video about the accuracy with a better recreation:
https://youtu.be/ABFGKdKKKyg
Re: Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++
#34I wonder if people who wrote that code also consider their job boring and uninspiring
Writing numerical solvers isn't that inspiring by itself to be honest. But I agree that the subject is fascinating. I suppose the code is not public so we could see ourselves, is it?
Re: Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
How fast could this run in a modern CPU with a modern GPU?
GPUs are almost irrelevant for VFX work at this scale due to the memory requirements. The render nodes used for Interstellar had 156GB of RAM, and a decade later the biggest GPUs still don't have that much memory (unless you count Macs I suppose but the existing software ecosystem is very CUDA-centric). Small VFX shops do typically render on GPUs nowadays, but the high end is still dominated by CPU rendering.
As a matter of fact, Pixar render farm is mostly based on CPU rendering.
Re: Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPUs are almost irrelevant for VFX work at this scale due to the memory requirements. The render nodes used for Interstellar had 156GB of RAM, and a decade later the biggest GPUs still don't have that much memory (unless you count Macs I suppose but the existing software ecosystem is very CUDA-centric). Small VFX shops do typically render on GPUs nowadays, but the high end is still dominated by CPU rendering.
As a matter of fact, Pixar render farm is mostly based on CPU rendering.
That goes for all the biggest players - Pixar, WDAS, Dreamworks, ILM, WETA, Framestore... all do their final rendering on CPUs. Some of them have adopted a hybrid workflow where artists can use GPU rendering to quickly iterate on small slices of data though.
Re: Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++
#37The title is basically nonsense. They're talking about the black hole in that movie.
What did you expect from the title? That they used Einstein's equations to render the actors? Of course it's the black hole.
Since the digital movie camera used to film the actors relies on the photoelectric effect to turn light into pixel data, you could say Einstein’s equations were used for the live-action portion too!
Re: Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did we watch the same movie? They got bunch of physics stuff right, like the water planet, the relative aging due to being near the massive black hole etc. Only thing that wasn't "correct" was the wormhole and especially the tesseract, but that was some creative writing which allowed for a nice twist. I enjoyed it, a nice scifi.
The whole premise is bogus and explained by Michael Caine in only a few sentences. We have a plague on Earth and doing an interstellar travel is the solution? I was very disappointed. I’m OK with a few plot holes, but this is so fundamental to the story that the movie can’t stand on its own.
Yeah, they could've used something simpler and less hand-wavy. Irreversible climate change or a freaking asteroid on a collision course with earth and they needed the black hole data to build something to deviate it. Literally anything else would've worked better.
Re: Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++
#39It is a pity they didn't spend comparable effort on the story. I thought it was a really disappointing film, especially after they banged on so much about how good the physics in it was (apart from the black hole rendering, it wasn't).
100% agree, like you I was hyped after the pre-release teaser PR stuff came out about the realistic black hole rendering etc, was hoping for an actually decent sci-fi
and then just a lame story culminating in "space ghosts"
for me, arguably most disappointing movie ever
Re: Interstellar movie black hole implemented with Einstein's equations in C++
#40Interstellar blackhole VFX implemented in 40k lines of C++ Would be a better title
Implemented using semi-realistic Einstein equations. They do talk about implementing a fully realistic version in the paper, but the director deemed it visually too confusing for the audience, so you only get to see a dumbed-down version in the movie.