1/6 A year and a half later, I finally finished my black hole project. #madewithunreal and now powered by #Niagara, this shader/sim implements physically correct gravitational lensing, which bends the light in all kinds of groovy ways! #gamedev #realtimevfx #astronomy #UE4 #UE5
2/6 A weird phenomena of gravitational lensing is the photon-sphere. @ScienceClic hooked me up with the equations I needed to represent this. When done correctly, zooming the camera in yields the same image repeat over and over to infinity (it gets small though)!
3/6 The accretion disk was my main focus this time around. I ended up learning how to write fluid solvers because I didn't want a static texture that was just warping around the event horizon. I wanted something alive, dynamic and violent.
4/6 Another addition was the fog layer - For this I ended up doing a downsample of the render target to get a nice blurred accretion disk. I also added a Henyey Greenstein phase function which is subtle but added a bit of realism.
5/6 #Niagara is a game changer. It gives me such fine control over pretty much everything involved in the sim. I set everything up so I can control things like a custom density attribute and color over distance to the event horizon.
6/6 I hope you enjoy these videos!
There's a crap ton of useful tidbits I can't go over in a Twitter thread, but perhaps this would be a good premium tutorial for Overdraw.xyz - what ya'll be interested?
There's a crap ton of useful tidbits I can't go over in a Twitter thread, but perhaps this would be a good premium tutorial for Overdraw.xyz - what ya'll be interested?
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