Well, India is abuzz with Interstellar, especially the visual depiction of Black Hole and the wormhole. The whole light and matter twisting effect and the glowing ring of light around the Blackhole are all based on equations given by Astro-physicist Kip Thorne who is also the co-producer of Interstellar, to a team of 30 people who worked with the help of thousands of computers . Paul Frankline the key visual effects person and his team wrote a new rendering software based on the equations and created the effect of a wormhole that looked like a crystal ball , essentially a spherical hole .
For the black hole generation the complex frames took hours to render, and the movie ended up playing with 800TB of data. The beauty of visual effects is not just in achieving the outcome of equations but also in rendering and being justifiable to a common man in the movie hall
In the meanwhile a team of astrophysicists from University of Arizona, Chi-kwan Chan, Dimitrios Psaltis and Feryal Ozel have created their own version of how a black hole would look and behave. They used UA’s own supercomputer named El Gato, to generate visualizations of a black hole in our neighborhood, Sagittarius A* , nearly 26000 light years away.
According to the UA team the team can generate simulations that are far more scientifically accurate in a few seconds! That’s a feat indeed, given that the some of the Interstellar effects took hours to render.
