Speaker
Description
We would like to present the Black Hole Render Engine for the industry standard, open-source, 3d graphics software Blender. Our render engine has two unique capabilities. First it is able to render images of textured meshes at arbitrarily close and far away positions to a black hole. Secondly, the camera can be freely orientated in spacetime and placed anywhere between far away (for research use cases) and very close to the black hole (for educational and outreach purposes). We made a custom Python package called curvedpy to calculate photon geodesics, which is based on peer-reviewed techniques in general relativity. These geodesics are used in the render engine to trace rays around both static (Schwarzschild) and rotating (Kerr) black hole spacetimes. The Render Engine is also compatible with established astronomical codes like kgeo, used for analysis of astronomical observations of black holes with telescopes like the Event Horizon Telescope. The Black Hole Render Engine as well as curvedpy are open source and freely available on github (https://github.com/bldevries/curvedpy) and the pypi repository.
| Talk category | Communication & education (contact H.M.Baan@uva.nl) |
|---|---|
| Preference for a talk or poster | Talk |
