Gearbox R&D director made physically correct black hole model with Unreal Engine 5
Ryan James Smith, tech art R&D director at Gearbox, has introduced a black hole model he’s been working on for a year and a half. The whole project was made with Unreal Engine.
Smith shared the results of his work on Twitter, saying that the model is powered by Niagara VFX. It is a tool for visual effects inside Unreal Engine 5, which helped the developer implement physically correct gravitational lensing.
1/6 A year and a half later, I finally finished my black hole project. #madewithunreal and now powered by #Niagara, this shader/sim implements physically correct gravitational lensing, which bends the light in all kinds of groovy ways! #gamedev #realtimevfx #astronomy #UE4 #UE5 pic.twitter.com/fIAJgBmgPm
— Ryan James Smith (@OverdrawXYZ) April 4, 2022
“Niagara is a game changer,” Smith wrote. “It gives me such fine control over pretty much everything involved in the sim. I set everything up so I can control things like a custom density attribute and color over distance to the event horizon.”
Popular YouTube channel ScienceClic provided Smith with the equations he needed to complete the project.
4/6 Another addition was the fog layer – For this I ended up doing a downsample of the render target to get a nice blurred accretion disk. I also added a Henyey Greenstein phase function which is subtle but added a bit of realism. pic.twitter.com/VYPWFCut7C
— Ryan James Smith (@OverdrawXYZ) April 4, 2022
Epic Games launched Unreal Engine 5 on April 5 after testing the framework in multiple projects. During the keynote, Crystal Dynamics also announced that it is now working on a new Tomb Raider game using UE5.
