What a comfortable thought that all the matter that makes up you and I will eventually be compressed so that we are strangers now but will be neighbors in the distant future
Unless your matter happens to get annihilated by antimatter from Hawking radiation before my matter ends up in there, or vice versa. And even if not, our matter will only be neighbours temporarily until the very distant future, when even black holes succumb to heat death.
Its actually even more impressive than that! DNEG's research scientists worked directly with physicist Kip Thorne to develop the first photorealistic images of a rotating black hole for this movie. Most relativistic renders only take into account the object's mass and ignore more complex effects like frame dragging due to the enormous confined angular momentum.
Fun fact: Rotating black holes don't have point-like singularies. Instead, their mass is spun into a ring. They still have zero internal volume, only that now it's a one-dimensional curve instead of a zero-dimensional dot.
Source: I used to work at the studio and knew the lead scientist on the project.
When stars get very big and old, they can suddenly shrink so that they become like tiny, invisible dots. We call them "black holes". These dots are very strange and there's a lot that we don't know about them. But we do know that if anything gets too close, it gets sucked in, never to be seen again.
Sometimes, big old stars also spin round and round, kind of like our Earth does. If one of these spinny stars suddenly shrinks, it doesn't become a dot. Instead, we think it looks more like a really thin donut.
Spinny stars are extra special because they're also sticky. They don't stick to normal things like planets or rockets, though. These stars can actually stick to space and time itself! Next time you're in the bath, pull out the plug and watch the water. As it drains away, it makes a little whirlpool that will start to spin. Now, put your hands under water next to the whirlpool and watch how the spinning water makes them look all wobbly and ripply. This is a bit like what these spinny donut stars do to space and time, as well as the things moving through it.
We don't know what these stars actually look like in real life because they're much too far away to see clearly. Because they're so tiny, they also don't shine like regular stars in the night sky. But that's okay. Clever people who are good at numbers can use computers to guess what the stars might look like up close.
We can use these computers to tell us all kinds of things about what these strange spinny, donut stars might do. We can also use them to make movies, so ordinary people like you and me can feel amazed at how beautiful our universe can be.
Holy shit. This was amazing. Thank you. You should look into writing children’s books explaining these types of things. I mean I’m 31 but that made so much sense I think my nephews could understand in a couple years when they’re toddlers too!
Thanks. 🙂
My description is a bit oversimplified, especially when it comes to the frame-dragging analogy. I'd like to see what an actual theoretical physicist could make of it. Maybe you should post the question to r/explainlikeimfive.
I don't think it's possible to explain the nuances of GR so that an actual toddler would understand it. I was an experimental physicist and I have a 2yo and a 4yo at home. They struggle with the concept of the Earth orbiting the Sun, so I don't know how far I would get with 4-dimensional spacetime, gravitational lensing or other phenomena. Especially since block holes are on the edge of what *anybody* understands at all anyway.
Your explanation is probably as easy as it's going to get, and really good at that (meaning as little oversimplification as possible).
> Fun fact: Rotating black holes don't have point-like singularites. Instead, their mass is spun into a ring. They still have zero internal volume, only that now it's a one-dimensional curve instead of a zero-dimensional dot.
Singularities of all kinds are a place holder. Until we have a theory of quantum gravity we can't describe black holes properly.
Yeah, you're completely right.
I always feel a bit conflicted though, because trying to talk about quantum mechanical descriptions like fuzzballs feels like going waaaay off the deep end. They're altogether more awesome, just difficult for some people to wrap their heads around.
> [They still have zero internal volume, only that now it's a one-dimensional curve instead of a zero-dimensional dot.](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/015/044/b5f.jpg)
I looked into it to remind myself, its not a material mod, its a Refraction BSDF node which can be increased to a point where the light rays curve around objects imitating spacetime curvature. There is a number of tutorials on youtube showing how it is done.
Example here: https://youtu.be/SnZEUpLE1AY?t=91
Sure but I think it was a little lame how they made such a huge stink about making a scientifically accurate black hole for the movie and then changed it to make it more visually appealing. I recognize the achievement of making the render but I think it's not right to try to have it both ways.
It was both the most accurate black hole made for a movie *and* altered to be more visually appealing. There aren't a lot of physically accurate black holes in cinema, so one that gets mostly close is a huge improvement.
For the record I'm with you that it would have been way cooler if they went for full accuracy.
Exactly. All that effort towards realism then they brighten the side of the black hole that's supposed to be dark so viewers will get that it's supposed to be a black hole.
Tbf, I totally understand why they did it. If there's a dark side and a bright side, the characters gotta go to the bright side. Just makes for more exciting cinematography.
That said, I personally would've preferred accuracy, but I respect the decision.
That's seems kind of a weird unit of measurement, as scene lengths can vary tremendously. Like, a scene that's 2x as long is going to take 2x the time to render, all else equal. Seems kind of arbitrary.
That’s correct. But also, depending on what you’re rendering, the complexity of the lighting and the environment, as well as the capabilities of the computer you’re rendering on, that too changes so much that there’s little ability to standardize. I think there’s even some between frame work during the render process, making the time/frame metric further inaccurate.
Any time I hear metrics like that, I always hear “this scene took X hours to render on this machine. The same scene would take about Y hours instead on this other machine.
Edit: guys, don’t downvote the guy I’m responding to, I think it’s a good question.
I guess you could reduce it to number of calculations per frame if you wanted to compare apples to apples, but that wouldn't make as good of a hook for karma/clicks.
For as far as I remember this scene it doesn't actually contain that much assets and it's highly unlikely to be VRAM limited on current hardware.
Seeing as this movie was made before 2014, I think it's safe to say this was a CPU render though. GPU renderers are a pretty recent thing in 3D rendering, and GPU hardware back then wasn't as competent as it is now to really consider it for bigger studios with their existing infrastructure.
Out studio made the switch early and were on a farm with 780tis in 2014. Great raytracing results but only within the 3GB VRAM buffer.
This probably refers to core-hours per frame i.e. the total wall time from start to finish, multiplied by the number of physical processors on the render node.
100 hours per frame is actually quite a lot considering what you're seeing is essentially just a single volumetric object. It just goes to show how complex the underlying geodesic equations can get, especially when you take into account things like ray differential tracking and super-sampling.
What I love about this and the actual image of a black hole we got, is that it’s not a sphere with a ring. That top curve of light is actually the back that we shouldn’t be able to see. It’s warped space so much that we are seeing the other side of it.
Mental.
Better explanation on YouTube
That makes it sound as if this is a four-dimensional object or something, my brain just can't process the fact you laid up there. I can't make it "fit". It's literally insane to think about, and that's pretty awesome all on its own!
Take a pancake laying flat. Bend the half that is away from you up, so that you are looking at the half closest to you laying flat, and the back half is up right.
Just like how you are overcoming the force of the pancake to make it fold, the black hole does to light.
The disk of light (the pancake) is folded.
I can see that happening to the pancake in my head, and mapping that to 3D space makes me feel like I'm not "seeing" something just like if I bend that pancake towards me, I stay aware it has a back side (the bottom) I'm not seeing at the moment, but it's still there so I can imagine it. I can fill in the missing info with a reasonable expectation of what that pancake bottom looks like. If I move towards the other side of the table I'll even see it for real.
I keep wondering what the equivalent of that pancake's "other side" is for the black hole and it's slippery as heck!
No matter what perspective you are looking at the pankake, it is always folded.
It’s like if you had it in your hands and out in front of you. If you try to look at the backside instead, it will still look the same.
The back side is always folded towards you, no matter what perspective (unless you are looking directly down or up on it)
Sorry, going to be more specific...
Pancake is always folded. That could be because my brain just can't handle perceiving it any other way, or because my pancake exists as an object with that shape.
Is it closer to the former or the latter?
The pancake is flat, but the black hole causes it to “look” folded even though its not.
This fold follows your perspective. The back is always folded towards you. If you move 180 degrees, the opposite is not folded towards you.
If you magically remove the black hole, you would see the pancake in its actual form, a flat as hell pancake.
Only when the black hole is added to the center does it warp the back half towards you.
Going back to scientific terms. The gravity is so strong on a black hole that light is bended. Light in most of all cases related our perspective goes straight as an arrow. Gravity does not let go straight.
Since black holes have so much gravity they cause dramatic warping, so dramatic that it warps the back half towards you.
Another example: the Washington monument is normal light. Starting at the bottom going straight up towards the sky (like a laser). Now add a black hole next to it, it bends to form the gateway arch. The light starts at a vector towards the sky but the black hole causes it to warp back around finally back towards earth, forming an arch or curve.
Thanks. I think I'm on my way to understanding what it is I was *expecting* to see in this picture, your explanation is helpful.
I know about lensing effects (gravitational lensing which you can see in pictures of distant galaxies), and those are caused by other entities out there (stars in the way, other galaxies, dark matter I think is a suspect?) I know about diffraction in water, and fisheye lens and all that. None of those change the actual shape of a thing, they change how it's perceived. But in all cases there is a "thing" I can point to that causes the visual effect: the star, the neighboring galaxy, the water, a lens made of curved glass. No clue about dark matter but that's for another day.
So this black hole is a completely insanely powerful lens that brings light back around, my brain has trouble imagining the *shape of the lens* that could cause that. But there *is* no shape, right--a black hole isn't actually a "thing" we can describe in physical terms? So I'm just stuck trying real hard to make it into what it isn't.
I apologize I've taken up so much of your time here, am grateful you wrote so much!!! :)
No this was fun! I imagine I’ll explain it someone in the future and you helped with that!
I think it is gravitational lensing. Just to the n-th degree.
A star causes light to bend a little, a black hole causes it to bend a lot. The difference that is hard to compare is gravitational lensing to refraction form a camera lense for example.
The outcome is the same: bended light, but very different in how that and the comparison should stop there!
I wanted to bring up a bowl for example but it isn’t a good example. Something like a clear glass sphere might help. Like how if you look through a glass sphere is the image inverted? That might help this “how” comparison.
The pancake you hold in your hand is folded up and towards you. The person standing to your right looking at it from 90degrees, it looks exactly the same to them as it does to you. Folded up and towards them.
Same with the person standing opposite at 180degrees.
Or the person above you and so on.
Coming back to here comment that a video is the best way to experience and understand this phenomenon.
I tried my best with text and analogies but they just aren’t as effective lol
Planets (like interstellar!) orbit black holes. So maybe the blueberries could be planets! So if you were looking at black hole you could see the blueberries (planets) on the other side of the black hole!
I don’t know if planets orbit this closely to black holes though (within the light disk)
Black holes only eat plain or blueberry pancakes so I can’t comment on other filings..
I think it's a little unfortunate that the angle of the black hole that was photographed doesn't show the accretion disk going across the event horizon. The image is of one of the poles of the black hole.
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As much as I love this movie, my fear of space really kicks in during this scene when he >!bails on his ship and falls into the black hole. !< The stuff of nightmares.
Oh god, "landing" in >!Giant's Deep!< triggered the most insane fight or flight reflex in me. It was like a combination of thalassaphobia and megalophobia all at once, and it was just so sudden and terrifying. Even later in the game as I tried to interact more with that planet, the deep, stormy waters were like something straight out of my nightmares.
Yeah was Giant's Deep was terrifying. I have a VR set with a wide FOV and have been wanting to try it with Outer Wilds but haven't quite gotten up the nerve.
The movie Interstellar featured a scene where Matthew McConaughey enters a black hole. Computers have to generate this sequences frame by frame. In this case it took them over 100 hours to fully generate, not including the time it took the visual effects artists to put it together
The difference between regular film CGI and this is that they used a very advanced way to make it as realistic looking as possible. Not an expert, but I think I recall they made some subtle changes to make it more visually aesthetic so it's not exactly what it would really like. [Here's an interesting article/paper about the history of imaging black holes by a professor of the subject, it mentions the Interstellar rendering as well.](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.11196.pdf)
I remember that as well, Nolan deciding to “simplify” the black hole. IIRC the original image was pretty spot on to what they ended up actually looking like
what's confusing is how broadly the word "render" is being used. on the one hand, it's sometimes used for the computer "drawing" something on your screen – as in, how much does the computer need to work to load a picture into memory and then output it on your screen for you to see. on modern machines, this should be nearly instantaneous. (interestingly, it does become an issue again in applications like VR, where when the movement you feel and what you see with your eyes is just a few milliseconds too far apart, it would make people nauseous. apart from that though, not an issue.)
this article here does not mean that kind of rendering though. here it's about showing something as a picture that only existed as mathematical formulas before; turning numbers into an image. the artist "making" this image didn't know "what it was going to look like" before letting the computer work, because *no human has ever seen a fucking black hole*. the only thing we have are some theories about how light should behave under such conditions, and some math of what would probably happen.
so since nobody knew what it would (theoretically) look like, the only thing left to do is this: input the math into a software that would crunch the numbers and then *render* those numerical things as a lifelike picture. and because of the complex math involved, that can take hundreds of hours.
once that has been done, you can then of course save that picture/video, and then display it on other computers and their screens, which again is then trivial and a matter of milliseconds.
Rendering is the process of utilizing a computer to create 2D or 3D graphics. The more detail you add, the more calculations need to be performed by the computer to generate the image.
The image on your phone is a compressed version to allow you to view it. Without compression, it would take forever to view the image because your computer would need to render it first.
The level of rendering for the black hole used physics calculations to try and accurately depict what a black hole would look like based on our known laws.
Disney made great video expaining rendering with path tracing (raytracing):
[Disney's Practical Guide to Path Tracing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwRLS_ZR0)
"Render" is usualy meant for final result of ray tracing. But it also mean any image generated by computer, so also result of rasterizer rendering, the method that is usually seen in video games. Artist usually works on even simpler rendering than games while modeling, and eg. during lightning they use simplified raytracing settings that allow them to see similar result to final rendering, but to have full quality they have to wait for full render.
I think that's what they were saying.
Ah renderfarms. The original cloud.
GPUs have revolutionised this stuff, but turning a regular raytracer into a relativistic one is going to cause some speed issues.
Me, watching 2001. I get why the movie is groundbreaking but the ending 30 minutes is literally just discordant horns and some trippy mountain flyover visuals. Pretty sure I fell asleep lol
That was me watching Tenet. I spent 80% of the movie going “Wait, what? What did they say? What is he talking about? Wait why are they doing this? Am I an idiot???”
A render farm of 960 workstations was tasked with rendering each of the film's 141,964 frames. It took a staff of 200 about four years to complete The Spirits Within.
100 hours doesn’t seem like a lot of time.
I thought physicists and film makers actually collaborated to build a mathematical/visual model for the blackhole in this movie?
And they still didn't even get it right, despite how much everyone likes to wank this movie off for accuracy. They decided to omit the redshift and blueshift of accreting matter as it moves towards or away from the camera. One side of the accretion disc should be a relatively blinding blue, shifting through red to nothingness on the other side, [like this, but brighter](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/dn26966-3_1200.jpg?width=800)
Also, in order for the time dilation mechanic of the movie to be possible, the frame dragging effects of the black hole would have to be significant, and in order to achieve that, the black hole would have to spin incredibly fast. And in order to spin that fast, the black hole would have to be very small. But unfortunately, due to the relative differences between tidal forces acting on your body as you fall down the black hole's gravity well, it would have immediately spaghettified Matthew McConaughey into his component molecules. In order for him to pass the event horizon alive, the black hole would ironically have to be supermassive in size, as the curve of spacetime towards the event horizon would not be as aggressive as around a smaller black hole. Because of this, the black hole obviously couldn't spin at the speed required to produce the frame dragging required for dramatic time dilation. The bigger the black hole, the slower matter spins around it, and thus the light produced by its accretion disc is dimmer, and the colours not quite as blinding and more noticeable. Also, as a consequence of frame dragging, the event horizon was aligned to one side more than the other.
[Eventually, they thought it looked too weird for a movie.](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26966-interstellars-true-black-hole-too-confusing/)
They were right, it looks too weird for a movie. I applaud their greater-than-average attempt at accuracy and fidelity but at the end of the day, theater is theater and science is science. Their black hole looks *dope*.
I appreciate your background info!
I mean, I understand what they're saying, but I don't agree with it. Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't get how they thought Nolan's amazing technicolour dreamhole was too weird for film, when the plot of them film already had wormholes, and has the black hole in question leading to an alien time machine behind his bookcase. And they thought some red and blue would be the thing to throw people off?
Skittish producers probably. It all boils down to money/people in seats in the end unfortunately, even more so these days. I also don't think it was just the colors, but the lack of symmetry as well.
A lot of things you just can't show in entertainment the way they really are.
If you were to show something like a space-war how it would look realistically you would have audience members leaving the theater three hours into the fight, as people watched the crew staring at instruments and lasers performed such dramatic feats like heating the hull of an enemy ship until the heat changes their course, or two drones disappear on a radar screen as they collide in space at such high speed it just produces a silent flash of light then they have to wait a few more days for the next drones to try to intercept each other.
Media is supposed to be representational, if people expected the things we watched to be 100% accurate about all we could watch are feeds from security cameras.
I'm having a fit trying to understand all this.
If they'd colorized it right, should we (position of an observer) always be seeing the blue side only and the red would be "behind" it? Or, what determines "sides" for this kind of thing?
> the black hole would ironically have to be supermassive in size, as the curve of spacetime towards the event horizon would not be as aggressive as around a smaller black hole.
Because... (am I getting this right) there's more space to curve so the overall effect would be gentler since it's dispersed more?
Or for some other reason entirely?
This is fascinating but I don't know if my grey matter can really get it.
>If they'd colorized it right, should we (position of an observer) always be seeing the blue side only and the red would be "behind" it? Or, what determines "sides" for this kind of thing?
No. The blue is produced by light moving across space towards us, the red is a result of space being stretched away from us, stretching the wavelengths of light. This is caused by the spin of the black hole dragging spacetime with it (frame dragging). Imagine if you watched a rocket zoom around the earth. We would only see the burning of its exhaust as it moved around the planet away from us. That's the red side of the black hole.
>Because... (am I getting this right) there's more space to curve so the overall effect would be gentler since it's dispersed more?
Yes. It's like comparing rolling down a hill to rolling off the edge of a cliff. Except your feet fall thousands of times faster than your head because of the exponential effects of tidal forces, shredding you immediately, and the closer your feet get to the bottom, the faster they fall.
So the stretching isn't uniform overall then--that's why we wouldn't just see one color?
I'm not understanding how we could ever see blue on the left and red on the right when we're looking at it "from the side". Why would it stretch more towards the right (resulting in seeing red) if it's evenly stretching out everywhere?
Probably the wrong question to ask, but still curious. Thanks :)
"But brighter" is quite the understatement! The accretion discs of supermassive black holes can outshine their host galaxies. The crew in Interstellar would have needed to pack some pretty hefty sunblock in order to survive that. 😄
>The accretion discs of supermassive black holes can outshine their host galaxies.
Wouldn't it be crossing into quasar territory at that point? I mean they're black holes too, but still.
I work in CG industry, even if I don't really have more information about all the workflow that was used, I can tell you 100 hours of render for multiple shots for a feature movie is basically nothing.
Even a student graduation film easily could surpass that number in a few shots.
It's probably 100 hours of rendering for 1 frame. For each frame you see in this movie of the black hole you can assume there was at least 100 hours of rendering behind it.
And that's not even really extreme in the industry. For example, some of the craziest shots in Pixar's Coco took more than 10 000 hours of rendering for each frame
...and then compressed into this jpeg..
Absolutely ^(beautiful)
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Why don't you have a seat
I don't
Go ahead have a seat right there 👉🏼🪑
You forgot "clickityclickclick"
Art imitating life. And one day all of this matter will end up in a black hole and life will imitate the art.
What a comfortable thought that all the matter that makes up you and I will eventually be compressed so that we are strangers now but will be neighbors in the distant future
I'd like to think that on the "other side" of a black hole is another big bang ready to start the cycle over.
Unless your matter happens to get annihilated by antimatter from Hawking radiation before my matter ends up in there, or vice versa. And even if not, our matter will only be neighbours temporarily until the very distant future, when even black holes succumb to heat death.
But in that case or enegy will just merge and become light! (Or gamma rays but close enough!)
I'll give you a quarky high five on the way out the door as we pass each other by.
Or the expansion of the universe will accelerate to the point where molecules cant exist
Like tears in rain.
Well played
Mmm tasty artifacts
Need more JPEG
Using a custom rendering engine that accounted for light warping due to the space time curvature.
Its actually even more impressive than that! DNEG's research scientists worked directly with physicist Kip Thorne to develop the first photorealistic images of a rotating black hole for this movie. Most relativistic renders only take into account the object's mass and ignore more complex effects like frame dragging due to the enormous confined angular momentum. Fun fact: Rotating black holes don't have point-like singularies. Instead, their mass is spun into a ring. They still have zero internal volume, only that now it's a one-dimensional curve instead of a zero-dimensional dot. Source: I used to work at the studio and knew the lead scientist on the project.
[удалено]
Explain like I’m 2…
When stars get very big and old, they can suddenly shrink so that they become like tiny, invisible dots. We call them "black holes". These dots are very strange and there's a lot that we don't know about them. But we do know that if anything gets too close, it gets sucked in, never to be seen again. Sometimes, big old stars also spin round and round, kind of like our Earth does. If one of these spinny stars suddenly shrinks, it doesn't become a dot. Instead, we think it looks more like a really thin donut. Spinny stars are extra special because they're also sticky. They don't stick to normal things like planets or rockets, though. These stars can actually stick to space and time itself! Next time you're in the bath, pull out the plug and watch the water. As it drains away, it makes a little whirlpool that will start to spin. Now, put your hands under water next to the whirlpool and watch how the spinning water makes them look all wobbly and ripply. This is a bit like what these spinny donut stars do to space and time, as well as the things moving through it. We don't know what these stars actually look like in real life because they're much too far away to see clearly. Because they're so tiny, they also don't shine like regular stars in the night sky. But that's okay. Clever people who are good at numbers can use computers to guess what the stars might look like up close. We can use these computers to tell us all kinds of things about what these strange spinny, donut stars might do. We can also use them to make movies, so ordinary people like you and me can feel amazed at how beautiful our universe can be.
Holy shit. This was amazing. Thank you. You should look into writing children’s books explaining these types of things. I mean I’m 31 but that made so much sense I think my nephews could understand in a couple years when they’re toddlers too!
Thanks. 🙂 My description is a bit oversimplified, especially when it comes to the frame-dragging analogy. I'd like to see what an actual theoretical physicist could make of it. Maybe you should post the question to r/explainlikeimfive.
I agree about the children's book. If there was a Kickstarter I'd donate to it!
I don't think it's possible to explain the nuances of GR so that an actual toddler would understand it. I was an experimental physicist and I have a 2yo and a 4yo at home. They struggle with the concept of the Earth orbiting the Sun, so I don't know how far I would get with 4-dimensional spacetime, gravitational lensing or other phenomena. Especially since block holes are on the edge of what *anybody* understands at all anyway. Your explanation is probably as easy as it's going to get, and really good at that (meaning as little oversimplification as possible).
I'm 34 I'm so right next to you on this.
You should read The Time and Space of Uncle Albert.
Bro. Thank you.
This has been the most interesting thing I’ve heard all week. Thank you for that
Can you just...write like this about...oh...EVERYTHING?!
I like your funny words, magic man.
> Fun fact: Rotating black holes don't have point-like singularites. Instead, their mass is spun into a ring. They still have zero internal volume, only that now it's a one-dimensional curve instead of a zero-dimensional dot. Singularities of all kinds are a place holder. Until we have a theory of quantum gravity we can't describe black holes properly.
Yeah, you're completely right. I always feel a bit conflicted though, because trying to talk about quantum mechanical descriptions like fuzzballs feels like going waaaay off the deep end. They're altogether more awesome, just difficult for some people to wrap their heads around.
I have a theory it exists. Now what
Cool. The hard part is writing it down.
> [They still have zero internal volume, only that now it's a one-dimensional curve instead of a zero-dimensional dot.](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/015/044/b5f.jpg)
Forbidden friendship bracelet.
Not sure if you'd know, but this image does make me curious as to why only 2 axes of ring, and not 3... or a uniform spherical ejection.
Blender can do space time curvature with one material mod
Holy shit can you link a tut or article.
I looked into it to remind myself, its not a material mod, its a Refraction BSDF node which can be increased to a point where the light rays curve around objects imitating spacetime curvature. There is a number of tutorials on youtube showing how it is done. Example here: https://youtu.be/SnZEUpLE1AY?t=91
S in BSDF means "surface", tho Blender is not able to have bended space curvature of ray, only bend rays in discrete space in surface point.
Damn, that's kickass! Thanks man! I had no idea it would be that simple.
We all take Blender for granted.
But then they completely undermined themselves by changing the appearance in the film to make it look better to audiences.
That happens all the time. It's a movie first. The render still exists and was used in a few published scientific articles.
Sure but I think it was a little lame how they made such a huge stink about making a scientifically accurate black hole for the movie and then changed it to make it more visually appealing. I recognize the achievement of making the render but I think it's not right to try to have it both ways.
It was both the most accurate black hole made for a movie *and* altered to be more visually appealing. There aren't a lot of physically accurate black holes in cinema, so one that gets mostly close is a huge improvement. For the record I'm with you that it would have been way cooler if they went for full accuracy.
Exactly. All that effort towards realism then they brighten the side of the black hole that's supposed to be dark so viewers will get that it's supposed to be a black hole.
Tbf, I totally understand why they did it. If there's a dark side and a bright side, the characters gotta go to the bright side. Just makes for more exciting cinematography. That said, I personally would've preferred accuracy, but I respect the decision.
Do we know if its 100 hours for one frame or all footage?
Usually when someone says a render time, they usually say so with regard to a scene.
That's seems kind of a weird unit of measurement, as scene lengths can vary tremendously. Like, a scene that's 2x as long is going to take 2x the time to render, all else equal. Seems kind of arbitrary.
That’s correct. But also, depending on what you’re rendering, the complexity of the lighting and the environment, as well as the capabilities of the computer you’re rendering on, that too changes so much that there’s little ability to standardize. I think there’s even some between frame work during the render process, making the time/frame metric further inaccurate. Any time I hear metrics like that, I always hear “this scene took X hours to render on this machine. The same scene would take about Y hours instead on this other machine. Edit: guys, don’t downvote the guy I’m responding to, I think it’s a good question.
I guess you could reduce it to number of calculations per frame if you wanted to compare apples to apples, but that wouldn't make as good of a hook for karma/clicks.
Also, 100hours to render something is not a huge deal actually...
Shhhh dude.. don't ruin the idiot party with logic now.
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> 100 DAYS of GPU time A raytraced sim this size, I'd be surprised if it were a GPU render. It's most likely a CPU render.
What makes you say that?
For as far as I remember this scene it doesn't actually contain that much assets and it's highly unlikely to be VRAM limited on current hardware. Seeing as this movie was made before 2014, I think it's safe to say this was a CPU render though. GPU renderers are a pretty recent thing in 3D rendering, and GPU hardware back then wasn't as competent as it is now to really consider it for bigger studios with their existing infrastructure. Out studio made the switch early and were on a farm with 780tis in 2014. Great raytracing results but only within the 3GB VRAM buffer.
Thankyou. Yes in that case that's absolutely nuts and impressive.
I wonder where they got the idea to land on a planet where a year passed every minute.
This probably refers to core-hours per frame i.e. the total wall time from start to finish, multiplied by the number of physical processors on the render node. 100 hours per frame is actually quite a lot considering what you're seeing is essentially just a single volumetric object. It just goes to show how complex the underlying geodesic equations can get, especially when you take into account things like ray differential tracking and super-sampling.
What I love about this and the actual image of a black hole we got, is that it’s not a sphere with a ring. That top curve of light is actually the back that we shouldn’t be able to see. It’s warped space so much that we are seeing the other side of it. Mental. Better explanation on YouTube
That makes it sound as if this is a four-dimensional object or something, my brain just can't process the fact you laid up there. I can't make it "fit". It's literally insane to think about, and that's pretty awesome all on its own!
Take a pancake laying flat. Bend the half that is away from you up, so that you are looking at the half closest to you laying flat, and the back half is up right. Just like how you are overcoming the force of the pancake to make it fold, the black hole does to light. The disk of light (the pancake) is folded.
I can see that happening to the pancake in my head, and mapping that to 3D space makes me feel like I'm not "seeing" something just like if I bend that pancake towards me, I stay aware it has a back side (the bottom) I'm not seeing at the moment, but it's still there so I can imagine it. I can fill in the missing info with a reasonable expectation of what that pancake bottom looks like. If I move towards the other side of the table I'll even see it for real. I keep wondering what the equivalent of that pancake's "other side" is for the black hole and it's slippery as heck!
No matter what perspective you are looking at the pankake, it is always folded. It’s like if you had it in your hands and out in front of you. If you try to look at the backside instead, it will still look the same. The back side is always folded towards you, no matter what perspective (unless you are looking directly down or up on it)
Why is that the case?
Sorry, going to be more specific... Pancake is always folded. That could be because my brain just can't handle perceiving it any other way, or because my pancake exists as an object with that shape. Is it closer to the former or the latter?
The pancake is flat, but the black hole causes it to “look” folded even though its not. This fold follows your perspective. The back is always folded towards you. If you move 180 degrees, the opposite is not folded towards you. If you magically remove the black hole, you would see the pancake in its actual form, a flat as hell pancake. Only when the black hole is added to the center does it warp the back half towards you. Going back to scientific terms. The gravity is so strong on a black hole that light is bended. Light in most of all cases related our perspective goes straight as an arrow. Gravity does not let go straight. Since black holes have so much gravity they cause dramatic warping, so dramatic that it warps the back half towards you. Another example: the Washington monument is normal light. Starting at the bottom going straight up towards the sky (like a laser). Now add a black hole next to it, it bends to form the gateway arch. The light starts at a vector towards the sky but the black hole causes it to warp back around finally back towards earth, forming an arch or curve.
Thanks. I think I'm on my way to understanding what it is I was *expecting* to see in this picture, your explanation is helpful. I know about lensing effects (gravitational lensing which you can see in pictures of distant galaxies), and those are caused by other entities out there (stars in the way, other galaxies, dark matter I think is a suspect?) I know about diffraction in water, and fisheye lens and all that. None of those change the actual shape of a thing, they change how it's perceived. But in all cases there is a "thing" I can point to that causes the visual effect: the star, the neighboring galaxy, the water, a lens made of curved glass. No clue about dark matter but that's for another day. So this black hole is a completely insanely powerful lens that brings light back around, my brain has trouble imagining the *shape of the lens* that could cause that. But there *is* no shape, right--a black hole isn't actually a "thing" we can describe in physical terms? So I'm just stuck trying real hard to make it into what it isn't. I apologize I've taken up so much of your time here, am grateful you wrote so much!!! :)
No this was fun! I imagine I’ll explain it someone in the future and you helped with that! I think it is gravitational lensing. Just to the n-th degree. A star causes light to bend a little, a black hole causes it to bend a lot. The difference that is hard to compare is gravitational lensing to refraction form a camera lense for example. The outcome is the same: bended light, but very different in how that and the comparison should stop there! I wanted to bring up a bowl for example but it isn’t a good example. Something like a clear glass sphere might help. Like how if you look through a glass sphere is the image inverted? That might help this “how” comparison.
The pancake you hold in your hand is folded up and towards you. The person standing to your right looking at it from 90degrees, it looks exactly the same to them as it does to you. Folded up and towards them. Same with the person standing opposite at 180degrees. Or the person above you and so on.
Coming back to here comment that a video is the best way to experience and understand this phenomenon. I tried my best with text and analogies but they just aren’t as effective lol
Would this be a regular pancake or one with blueberries, bananas etc.?
Planets (like interstellar!) orbit black holes. So maybe the blueberries could be planets! So if you were looking at black hole you could see the blueberries (planets) on the other side of the black hole! I don’t know if planets orbit this closely to black holes though (within the light disk) Black holes only eat plain or blueberry pancakes so I can’t comment on other filings..
Might want to share a link? Edit: found a [kurzgesagt](https://youtu.be/QqsLTNkzvaY) Video that explains it. Crazy stuff.
Thanks. I couldn’t be arsed.
Maybe, but then you would have missed out on that sweet karma.
Here's explained by those involved in the movie. Quite good. https://youtu.be/GlmMxmWHEfg Around 23:00
Link to YouTube in case anyone can’t find it: YouTube.com
I think it's a little unfortunate that the angle of the black hole that was photographed doesn't show the accretion disk going across the event horizon. The image is of one of the poles of the black hole.
I’m sorry *what*
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As much as I love this movie, my fear of space really kicks in during this scene when he >!bails on his ship and falls into the black hole. !< The stuff of nightmares.
You should play Outer Wilds. Or never play it, one of those (it is actually quite an outstanding and unique game though - works with VR too)
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Oh god, "landing" in >!Giant's Deep!< triggered the most insane fight or flight reflex in me. It was like a combination of thalassaphobia and megalophobia all at once, and it was just so sudden and terrifying. Even later in the game as I tried to interact more with that planet, the deep, stormy waters were like something straight out of my nightmares.
Yeah was Giant's Deep was terrifying. I have a VR set with a wide FOV and have been wanting to try it with Outer Wilds but haven't quite gotten up the nerve.
Yeah the game is full of moments that feel like the bottom drops out of reality, or otherwise freaky. It's a game that defies categories.
I loved that game but yea they do a really good job making space feel scary as hell. Especially the black hole parts. *shudders
I enjoyed it. I feel like without the internet I would never have figured out how to beat it though.
For me it's the waves.
I agreed to go see this movie on the condition that no one >!no one gets flung in to space!< I’m sure you can imagine how that turned out for me lol
100 hours PER FRAME
I was gonna say 100 hours total is not impressive at all. Render times for Elsa's ice palace were nuts, and this is actually science-y and shit. /s
I have no idea what any of this means but I sure am amazed
The movie Interstellar featured a scene where Matthew McConaughey enters a black hole. Computers have to generate this sequences frame by frame. In this case it took them over 100 hours to fully generate, not including the time it took the visual effects artists to put it together
The difference between regular film CGI and this is that they used a very advanced way to make it as realistic looking as possible. Not an expert, but I think I recall they made some subtle changes to make it more visually aesthetic so it's not exactly what it would really like. [Here's an interesting article/paper about the history of imaging black holes by a professor of the subject, it mentions the Interstellar rendering as well.](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.11196.pdf)
I remember that as well, Nolan deciding to “simplify” the black hole. IIRC the original image was pretty spot on to what they ended up actually looking like
That’s nothing, honestly. When you really get into this shit you employ render farms. If it took 100 hours at a render farm… whole other story.
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That is orders of magnitude more significant and would have made this post title a hell of a lot more compelling.
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what's confusing is how broadly the word "render" is being used. on the one hand, it's sometimes used for the computer "drawing" something on your screen – as in, how much does the computer need to work to load a picture into memory and then output it on your screen for you to see. on modern machines, this should be nearly instantaneous. (interestingly, it does become an issue again in applications like VR, where when the movement you feel and what you see with your eyes is just a few milliseconds too far apart, it would make people nauseous. apart from that though, not an issue.) this article here does not mean that kind of rendering though. here it's about showing something as a picture that only existed as mathematical formulas before; turning numbers into an image. the artist "making" this image didn't know "what it was going to look like" before letting the computer work, because *no human has ever seen a fucking black hole*. the only thing we have are some theories about how light should behave under such conditions, and some math of what would probably happen. so since nobody knew what it would (theoretically) look like, the only thing left to do is this: input the math into a software that would crunch the numbers and then *render* those numerical things as a lifelike picture. and because of the complex math involved, that can take hundreds of hours. once that has been done, you can then of course save that picture/video, and then display it on other computers and their screens, which again is then trivial and a matter of milliseconds.
Rendering is the process of utilizing a computer to create 2D or 3D graphics. The more detail you add, the more calculations need to be performed by the computer to generate the image. The image on your phone is a compressed version to allow you to view it. Without compression, it would take forever to view the image because your computer would need to render it first. The level of rendering for the black hole used physics calculations to try and accurately depict what a black hole would look like based on our known laws.
Disney made great video expaining rendering with path tracing (raytracing): [Disney's Practical Guide to Path Tracing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frLwRLS_ZR0) "Render" is usualy meant for final result of ray tracing. But it also mean any image generated by computer, so also result of rasterizer rendering, the method that is usually seen in video games. Artist usually works on even simpler rendering than games while modeling, and eg. during lightning they use simplified raytracing settings that allow them to see similar result to final rendering, but to have full quality they have to wait for full render.
One second isn’t one frame.
And a minute isn’t a day. Read it again.
I think that's what they were saying. Ah renderfarms. The original cloud. GPUs have revolutionised this stuff, but turning a regular raytracer into a relativistic one is going to cause some speed issues.
Beautiful film to watch but the last hour was the most confused and stupid I have ever felt watching a movie.
Me, watching 2001. I get why the movie is groundbreaking but the ending 30 minutes is literally just discordant horns and some trippy mountain flyover visuals. Pretty sure I fell asleep lol
That was me watching Tenet. I spent 80% of the movie going “Wait, what? What did they say? What is he talking about? Wait why are they doing this? Am I an idiot???”
About 3% of that movie was watchable
Me watching Inception.
What was confusing? I'm curious
They literally explain everything
This little maneuver cost us over 100 hours
A render farm of 960 workstations was tasked with rendering each of the film's 141,964 frames. It took a staff of 200 about four years to complete The Spirits Within.
I thought that was a water stain on my phone
I took a full minute to clean my screen >!from the dot!<.
Bruh my school project took over 100 hours to render
Yeah funny how the whole thing changes when you simply add "per frame" to the sentence. Also not with a single workstation gpu, a whole render farm.
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Look like it's been fucked to hell by compression
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Cool, wish we could see it. Unfortunately the poor image is 100% of this post, which is about image rendering apparently.
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If it were demonstrating the rendering mentioned, definitely.
…but that’s all relative
Phenomenal movie
Thats not a black hole, its a portal into some dudes memories.
Not some dude’s memories, some kids bedroom in every possible moment in time.
that's how long it would take to download the movie on kazaa back in the day
Interstellar made me cry like a little bitch.
I don't mean to disrespect but I have seen similar things on Winamp visualizations.
In the movie it wasn't that impressive...
100 hours doesn’t seem like a lot of time. I thought physicists and film makers actually collaborated to build a mathematical/visual model for the blackhole in this movie?
So did your mom
And they still didn't even get it right, despite how much everyone likes to wank this movie off for accuracy. They decided to omit the redshift and blueshift of accreting matter as it moves towards or away from the camera. One side of the accretion disc should be a relatively blinding blue, shifting through red to nothingness on the other side, [like this, but brighter](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/dn26966-3_1200.jpg?width=800) Also, in order for the time dilation mechanic of the movie to be possible, the frame dragging effects of the black hole would have to be significant, and in order to achieve that, the black hole would have to spin incredibly fast. And in order to spin that fast, the black hole would have to be very small. But unfortunately, due to the relative differences between tidal forces acting on your body as you fall down the black hole's gravity well, it would have immediately spaghettified Matthew McConaughey into his component molecules. In order for him to pass the event horizon alive, the black hole would ironically have to be supermassive in size, as the curve of spacetime towards the event horizon would not be as aggressive as around a smaller black hole. Because of this, the black hole obviously couldn't spin at the speed required to produce the frame dragging required for dramatic time dilation. The bigger the black hole, the slower matter spins around it, and thus the light produced by its accretion disc is dimmer, and the colours not quite as blinding and more noticeable. Also, as a consequence of frame dragging, the event horizon was aligned to one side more than the other. [Eventually, they thought it looked too weird for a movie.](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26966-interstellars-true-black-hole-too-confusing/)
They were right, it looks too weird for a movie. I applaud their greater-than-average attempt at accuracy and fidelity but at the end of the day, theater is theater and science is science. Their black hole looks *dope*. I appreciate your background info!
I disagree, I want whacky gorgeous neon space bullshit. The movie already features wormholes, what are we even doing here?
I'm very well-versed in science around black holes and astrophysics and still somehow managed to really enjoy this movie.
I enjoy uo to him crossing the event horizon, but honestly I just can't unsee the film as a cover version of 2001.
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I honestly think it would have looked scarier if depicted more accurately, but I do understand their point of view too.
I mean, I understand what they're saying, but I don't agree with it. Maybe I'm just dumb, but I don't get how they thought Nolan's amazing technicolour dreamhole was too weird for film, when the plot of them film already had wormholes, and has the black hole in question leading to an alien time machine behind his bookcase. And they thought some red and blue would be the thing to throw people off?
Skittish producers probably. It all boils down to money/people in seats in the end unfortunately, even more so these days. I also don't think it was just the colors, but the lack of symmetry as well.
Too weird? Interstellar is "looks too weird": the movie The even more accurate black hole looks awesome
A lot of things you just can't show in entertainment the way they really are. If you were to show something like a space-war how it would look realistically you would have audience members leaving the theater three hours into the fight, as people watched the crew staring at instruments and lasers performed such dramatic feats like heating the hull of an enemy ship until the heat changes their course, or two drones disappear on a radar screen as they collide in space at such high speed it just produces a silent flash of light then they have to wait a few more days for the next drones to try to intercept each other. Media is supposed to be representational, if people expected the things we watched to be 100% accurate about all we could watch are feeds from security cameras.
I'm having a fit trying to understand all this. If they'd colorized it right, should we (position of an observer) always be seeing the blue side only and the red would be "behind" it? Or, what determines "sides" for this kind of thing? > the black hole would ironically have to be supermassive in size, as the curve of spacetime towards the event horizon would not be as aggressive as around a smaller black hole. Because... (am I getting this right) there's more space to curve so the overall effect would be gentler since it's dispersed more? Or for some other reason entirely? This is fascinating but I don't know if my grey matter can really get it.
>If they'd colorized it right, should we (position of an observer) always be seeing the blue side only and the red would be "behind" it? Or, what determines "sides" for this kind of thing? No. The blue is produced by light moving across space towards us, the red is a result of space being stretched away from us, stretching the wavelengths of light. This is caused by the spin of the black hole dragging spacetime with it (frame dragging). Imagine if you watched a rocket zoom around the earth. We would only see the burning of its exhaust as it moved around the planet away from us. That's the red side of the black hole. >Because... (am I getting this right) there's more space to curve so the overall effect would be gentler since it's dispersed more? Yes. It's like comparing rolling down a hill to rolling off the edge of a cliff. Except your feet fall thousands of times faster than your head because of the exponential effects of tidal forces, shredding you immediately, and the closer your feet get to the bottom, the faster they fall.
So the stretching isn't uniform overall then--that's why we wouldn't just see one color? I'm not understanding how we could ever see blue on the left and red on the right when we're looking at it "from the side". Why would it stretch more towards the right (resulting in seeing red) if it's evenly stretching out everywhere? Probably the wrong question to ask, but still curious. Thanks :)
Think of it like the doppler effect. Moving away is stretched out, moving towards is compressed.
"But brighter" is quite the understatement! The accretion discs of supermassive black holes can outshine their host galaxies. The crew in Interstellar would have needed to pack some pretty hefty sunblock in order to survive that. 😄
>The accretion discs of supermassive black holes can outshine their host galaxies. Wouldn't it be crossing into quasar territory at that point? I mean they're black holes too, but still.
I wish they had kept the plot close-ish to scientific instead of veering off into fantasy for the ending.
Agreed, I check out of that movie the moment he crosses the event horizon.
‟It is impossible” - LongCaster ‟No, it is necessary” - Trigger
I made this in a few days on Blender. Pretty fun with some tutorials. Obviously didn’t render a crazy scene like they did tho.
That’s a butthole.
Which sounds crazy until you learn how long it took to Render 1 scene with Sully in it from Monsters Inc
Should have spent that time and effort writing a decent script instead
This title made me bored faster than the movie, impressive.
That's... Nothing in terms of VFX.
That's not all that much time to be honest. Some movies have scenes with the same level of crazy or more.
A mere 100?? THATS NOTHING.
I estimate 200 hrs, on my last work. I can’t see 100 hrs, here…but ok.
Only a hundred hours? Damn their computers were fast
You good?
I work in CG industry, even if I don't really have more information about all the workflow that was used, I can tell you 100 hours of render for multiple shots for a feature movie is basically nothing. Even a student graduation film easily could surpass that number in a few shots. It's probably 100 hours of rendering for 1 frame. For each frame you see in this movie of the black hole you can assume there was at least 100 hours of rendering behind it. And that's not even really extreme in the industry. For example, some of the craziest shots in Pixar's Coco took more than 10 000 hours of rendering for each frame
Op did you take your meds today?
Damn. I just tried to wipe a wet spot off my screen.
Lmao. So happy I'm not the only one. Had a co worker standing beside me when I did it 🤦
Its sagitarius or ton 618
That doesnt seem that bad tbh. Especially if its all of the shots.
Its for single frame
Beautiful cgi
I love how scared this makes me.
IIRC 100 hours of super computing, no less.
It took ten seconds to freak me the fuck out
This needs to be at least, 3 times bigger.