Community Mapping Challenge: Black Hole

drogyn1701

Let's do something fun!

Black Holes are all the rage these days. A black hole makes a prominent appearance in the new film Interstellar, and just today NASA put this out: http://mashable.com/2014/11/28/blackholefriday-nasa/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link

So how about we try and make a black hole space map for the Foundry. Give it a try and post some screenshots along with instructions on how to make it. Note: these don't necessarily have to be scientifically accurate, as that might be impossible.

For some more inspiration, here's some more images of black holes

And some as they have appeared on screen:

Interstellar
Stargate
Star Trek

starfarertheta

Whelp, here’s my attempt at a basic black hole.

Black Hole Attempt.


Ingredients:

3 Small Class D Planetoids occupying the same space (at least three are needed to get the middle, outer, and outermost rings to represent the accretion disk).
2 Huge blue nebulas to represent the jets.
Several huge yellow nebulas to surround planetoids.
Some asteroids to represent a debris field near the black hole (optional).


The downside to this is that it relies on high graphics settings, particularly bloom, to sell the illusion of a black hole. It doesn’t really work otherwise.



Original message:

Well this is timely, I'm going to have a part in Omnitabula where the player is going to search a debris field that is in orbit of a black hole. Now I have no idea how to actually make one, so the black hole itself was just going to be alluded to and just explain that the debris field was in stable orbit.

But now that this challenge is out, it may be worth looking into how to represent the black hole itself. In any case, I'll definitely be keeping an eye out on how those more skilled than I am go about it.

drogyn1701

Very cool!

I haven't been able to get into the editor since I thought of it this morning, but in envisioning how to do it, my thought was a planet, with nebula around it to make it look star-ish, and then use nebula to make a vertical swirl off to one side. Not going to be all that easy to make a vertical swirl, given the 2D map building we have to do, but I figure it'd be more visible to the player than a horizontal one.