Gargantua from Interstellar

[egdcltd]

So, I'm trying to make Gargantua from Interstellar, and this is the best attempt so far (really should have written down what I did!). It's not perfect, so I'm looking for feedback to improve it please - preferably without needing to use a really powerful computer like they did for the film! This image is much larger than it will be in the finished thing, as it's only a part of the overall picture.

[Mouse]

I spent 1/4 of my monthly broadband watching the film for you, just so that I understood what you meant! LOL!

(of course, if I'd realised watching a film online would do that to my broadband, I wouldn't have bothered. I was expecting a couple of GB, but not nearly 7 of them!)

I'd say, having seen the film that you need a lot more layers and a lot of transparency. There's more than just orange and yellow light at work. In fact there were all the colours of the spectrum in it. Its just that the overall blend was a sort of fiery colour, but the only way you're going to get there is just to work on it. If I was trying to reproduce it I would start with a perfectly smooth drawing of the basic shape done on at least 7 layers, each layer expressing that shape as a different hue on the spectrum (so that the combination of them all was white - the yellow-orange side of white). Then I would carefully and repeatedly smear each layer by hand, using the same movements on each and with a rough brush that's large enough to create the rippling effect around the outer edges, but not so large as to obliterate the shape itself - and fairly transparent of course.

Sorry if that doesn't make much sense, but its difficult expressing in words what I would do if I was drawing it. tbh - unfortunately my real life commitments are a bit heavy right now, and do not allow for time spent attempting to show you by drawing it myself, or I might have a go.

EDIT: Oh yes! It might be a good idea to mask out the blackness in the middle before you start - with a feathered mask

[waldronate]

What the moviemakers were trying to show in the black hole images is how the accretion disk would look in the context of a high gravitational field. What appears to be a ring is actually warped images of the backside of the accretion disk, not a separate thing. If you look at stills from those scenes, you'll see that the ring is connected directly to the foreground disk element. What you're showing here appears to be a glowing Saturn with a swirly disk, which isn't quite right. It's not an easy effect to get, especially when you read about the amount of computation that went into those images.

[Mouse]

Ok. My mind is now officially blown! LOL!

[egdcltd]

I spent 1/4 of my monthly broadband watching the film for you, just so that I understood what you meant! LOL!

(of course, if I'd realised watching a film online would do that to my broadband, I wouldn't have bothered. I was expecting a couple of GB, but not nearly 7 of them!)

Perhaps I should have linked to an image and a short YouTube clip...

What the moviemakers were trying to show in the black hole images is how the accretion disk would look in the context of a high gravitational field. What appears to be a ring is actually warped images of the backside of the accretion disk, not a separate thing. If you look at stills from those scenes, you'll see that the ring is connected directly to the foreground disk element. What you're showing here appears to be a glowing Saturn with a swirly disk, which isn't quite right. It's not an easy effect to get, especially when you read about the amount of computation that went into those images.

Yes, I was trying to get that bit but struggling (not having the immense computational capacity). I did add some brush strokes joining the disks to try and get that effect, but it didn't quite work. It might be small enough in the final image that it won't matter quite as much.

[Francissimo]

I just did a black hole for one of my maps so i totally understand how difficult it is to depict one, (in the bottom left of that map) https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...chmentid=92701
Maybe you can try to add some "whirlwind' effect to show the black hole is absorbing things. You can also work more on your lights, the blackhole itself absorbs all lights but you can show a glow all around it a bit like a sun.

[egdcltd]

I wanted the accretion disc to be a bit more swirly instead of rings (it was actually adapted from a planetary ring tutorial!).

[waldronate]

One way to get the effect (or one similar) without a huge amount of computation might be:
make a whirlpool with a hole cut out of the center
squash it so that it looks semi-perspective.
duplicate that layer
use a spherical distort tool (the bloat tool in Photoshop's liquefy tool is perfect) to distort the elliptical whirlpool into a circle. This will be the back image.
chop off the top half of the basic elliptical whirlpool and move it in front of the circle area.

I got the attached image using this technique (it shows the steps). The first three show making the disk, the next shows the vertical squash, the next using the bloat tool, and the final shows the previous two trimmed and composited.


The fun part is that the whirlpool is very broadly the accretion disk and the spherical distort of the whirlpool is a very broad approximation of what the local space distortion would do to that image in the back. A better accretion disk would be somewhat brighter toward the center hole, but perhaps not enough to be noticed in the glare. Gargantua in the story was a very quiet black hole, so there weren't any jets and the accretion disk was just enough there to make pretty visuals (still enough of one to lethally dose everything within a very large distance with high-energy radiation, though). An actively-feeding black hole would most likely be generating jets from the poles and the central area would be too bright to see much of the event horizon.

[Mouse]

Wow! Those are super FX Waldronate. Maybe instead of paying out billions to other people to do it the long way around with lots of sci-fi computers, they should just call you next time

[egdcltd]

I agree; how did you get the bloat tool to work so smoothly? Practice? (I've only just found out about it myself.)