Got motivated by the event last month "The supermassive black hole at the core of supergiant elliptical galaxy Messier 87", and OMG it was so ugly so I thought of recreating it Houdini 😉
You can get a 4K version of this effect here...
In short it's all about bending light so lens refraction is where you should focus and after a couple of experiments and value tweaking I came up with this result.
Tool's feature:
- Event horizon: the no return threshold "the black center"
- Accretion disk: a very hot dust and gas swirling around it "the glowy disk"
- A photon sphere: where all the light bending is happening, that what causes the beautiful distinctive look "the two half circles up and down" where the light coming from the accretion disk behind the black hole bends so you can see it upfront.
Note: it was created to be rendered with mantra so it wont be the fastest thing to render sadly. If you are interested with a Redshift version please let me know.