The TV and books I consumed as a kid made it seem plausible that people in the future will regularly talk like that.
Now, living in the future, I'm happy that it turned out to be true.
I like the way you raytrace the entire image at once. Clever, but you might be able to make it faster...
Right now you process the entire image in one hit. However a 1080p * 4 byte image is 777,600 bytes - from a quick read I believe you have several of these. They're large enough to blow the caches in your CPU.
It might be much faster to break the image into 8,16 or 32 square or rectangular or line shaped "patches" and process each in sequence. That would help you hit the same parts of your working arrays more often and keep them in cache between iterations.
I'm thinking
for patch in patches
for iter in iterations <-- currently your outer rendering loop
Hit me up at tom at gridspy (.co.nz) if you want to discuss further.
Amazing article, thankyou!
[Side note: In discussing the distortion of the event horizon, the author says "I suspect the punctured sphere → disk map is conformal/biholomorphic". There is a conformal map between the punctured sphere and the plane[0], but there is no conformal bijective map between the open unit disk and the full plane.[1] Thus, the punctured sphere and the unit disk cannot be conformally equivalent.]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereographic_projection [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_disk#The_open_unit_disk.2C...
Really nice.
Edit: Actually, I don't think you get any photons that do a full 360 degrees around the black hole that subsequently escape the black hole.
I would conjecture the contraction is roughly exponential, there's no obvious contradiction with that but it's way over by knowledge to check it ...
Although you might not want to get your ship too close to one with an accretion disk - it'll burn up. (If you do, at least use an all-black paint-job and look stylish.)
Recently for an abstract art project I wrote a simple gravitational lens simulator to distort an image as if there was a 10 Earth mass black hole between the viewer and the objects: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/test1....
It was a quick hack to explore the idea, and I'm pretty sure important details aren't right, but it was good enough for going on with. While doing it I remember thinking, "I wish I had time to explore this whole process properly." Now I don't have to!
We should really call this an artistic rendition of a black whole, because they look nothing like that. At least not as sexy.
I can't find the original but here:
https://thetruthbehindthescenes.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/...
I highly recommend looking at the literature for really cool images with more complicated black holes.
> I suspect the punctured sphere → disk map is conformal/biholomorphic, but I have no sources for this
It doesn't look conformal to me, some right angles become acute...
