Raytracing a Black Hole
rantonels.github.io
Raytracing a Black Hole
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#2This software (and the site itself) is good fun, but you have to build it yourself and feed it good parameters. Unfortunately it is not actively developed (I've been in touch with the author in the past).
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#3I love this site, the method is very clever. I did a re-implementation of this at one point for fun. One of my favorite things to do with this simulation is to actually plot the path of the photons as they approach the black hole (well, leave the black hole but you reverse time for ray tracing purposes). Conveys the idea pretty well that there's something funky going on with spacetime. E.g. here https://imgur.com/OPHLMJL (just a screen shot from back then, it's much more fun with sliders that led you move things around).
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#4I had never thought about it but in a sense black holes work as a mirror. Some light will sling shot around the back of the hole and back in the opposite direction.
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#5I had never thought about it but in a sense black holes work as a mirror. Some light will sling shot around the back of the hole and back in the opposite direction.
And some light will orbit for eons before either going in or escaping.
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#6For anyone interested, here are some videos of what it's like to fall into a black hole together with some very good explanations:
- https://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/index.html
- https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/26185/what-will-...
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#7I had never thought about it but in a sense black holes work as a mirror. Some light will sling shot around the back of the hole and back in the opposite direction.
This is called gravitational lensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#8On 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:
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#9I was rather confused by the section describing a "white and blue ... white and green" image that doesn't actually contain any green.
Eventually...
> The lower surface is blue and not green because I'm lazy
Being lazy is fine (I've rendered zero black holes myself), but he could at least be consistent.
Re: Raytracing a Black Hole
#10I 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 finish. But, not only was the render hammering and eating disks, the raid array was desperatly trying to rebuild the groups at the same time.
As soon as the group was rebuilt, another disk would fail.
so much joy. As soon as we had some slack, we migrated away from that server and gave something less stressful to do.