Was interested in trying to make a black hole effect in Blender, and this is what I ended up with (just gravitational lensing, not a real black hole). It's not perfect, but I'm really happy with how it came out.

I achieved it with a set of 10 concentric spheres. Each one is textured with a dot product between the incoming camera ray and the normal to give a Fresnel-like effect with black at the boundary and white in the center, and then I use an exponent to intensify the effect (and make the borders very indistinct), and feed that into a refraction node.

The concentric spheres allow repeated refractions to give the lensing effect, and the indistinct boundaries stack nicely.

#Blender #Blender3D #Art #3DArt #BlackHole #GravitationalLensing #GravitationalLense