Publications

Occasionally my work or work I'm part of gets published somewhere..

Building interstellar’s black hole: the gravitational renderer

Gravitational Rendering Paper

Published in ACM SIGGRAPH 2015

Building interstellar’s black hole: the gravitational renderer

Interstellar is the first feature film to attempt depicting a black hole as it would actually be seen by somebody nearby. A close collaboration between the production’s Scientific Advisor and the Visual Effects team led to the development of a new renderer, DNGR (Double Negative Gravitational Renderer) which uses novel techniques for rendering in curved space-time. Following the completion of the movie, the code was adapted for scientific research, leading to new insights into gravitational lensing.

Authors : Oliver James, Sylvan Dieckmann, Simon Pabst, Paul-George Roberts

Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar

Kip Thorne submitted this paper to the Cornell University Library at arXiv.org concerning the work on Interstellar.

Just an acknowledgement for contribution to the project, nice to contributing to science though, especially the field of astrophysics.

This is what the paper is about :

This paper has four purposes: (i) To describe DNGR for physicists and CGI practitioners . (ii) To present the equations we use, when the camera is in arbitrary motion at an arbitrary location near a Kerr black hole, for mapping light sources to camera images via elliptical ray bundles. (iii) To describe new insights, from DNGR, into gravitational lensing when the camera is near the spinning black hole, rather than far away as in almost all prior studies. (iv) To describe how the images of the black hole Gargantua and its accretion disk, in the movie \emph{Interstellar}, were generated with DNGR. There are no new astrophysical insights in this accretion-disk section of the paper, but disk novices may find it pedagogically interesting, and movie buffs may find its discussions of Interstellar interesting.

Wild and Beautiful Nature : Kosmos Journal

Kosmos Journal Spring/Summer 2014

Published in Kosmos Journal, Spring/Summer Edition 2014

Kosmos Journal

I was very happy to be invited to publish my work in the spring/summer edition of Kosmos Journal. The Kosmos Associates are a group dedicated to global policy change for the betterment of humanity as part of the United Nations and do good work.