Black hole textured in PdN

frio · September 10

Most of my paint.net work is 3D model textures for realtime environments and I felt like sharing a picture of a small black hole effect I made recently. The engine doesn't support refraction so can't fake gravitational lensing unlike you could in Blender renders, but it still looks fun and hypnotic.

https://i.imgur.com/D4VMxHo.jpg

The accretion disk is a variety of motion blurred random shape filled layers, many gradients and (tube) obliques, on a disk model designed to be texture animated to look like rotating plasma. The event horizon is a Blender-rendered equirectangular gradient -- making spherical textures from scratch isn't really a job for paint.net -- colored and distorted in paint.net to match. The engine can't individually spin the 1000 rock particles (only the asteroid belts as whole objects), but I manually painted a normal map that simulates all the dust surfaces spinning in a circle and animate that instead, giving them pleasing glitter.

A 5 sec video clip to see things in motion: https://i.imgur.com/cx3cZjo.mp4