BLACK HOLE SUN –

BLENDER & HITFILM EXPRESS

Black Hole Sun is an animation representing a black hole entirely created and animated in Blender, and post-edited in HitFilm Express. The title is borrowed from the eponymous 1994 song by Soundgarden.

The geometry is really simple: a sphere for the black hole and a cylinder for the accretion disk.

For the black hole ‘anatomy’ to be correct, there are several elements that have to come through: the refraction around the sphere, the inner photon ring and the circling accretion disk that emits more light and then dies out nearer to the sphere.

The success of the whole project entirely hinges on procedural shading and setting the correct values for the light paths in rendering settings to make some elements come through, such as the photon ring that is invisible at default light path values. An 8K starmap made by NASA was used for the environmental texture.

The animation was composited in Blender, rendered with Cycles as a continuous loop, and post-edited in HitFilm Express.