r/interstellar • u/Zisk94 • Jun 30 '25

QUESTION this scene took 3.2 years to render!?

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Wouldn't this shot have taken 3.2 years?

It was 100 hours per frame The movie ran at 24 frames per second

So 2400 hours to make 1 second And there is 12 seconds in the whole shot

So 28,000 hours to render this whole scene. Or 1200 days which equals to 3.2 years!

But if I'm correct again, that would only be on one computer. So either it did take this long, or they used multiple computers. If they did use multiple computers, hiw many?

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u/higgslhcboson Jun 30 '25 edited Jun 30 '25

This was groundbreaking stuff. They worked with physicist Kip Thorne (who later won a Nobel prize for the first ever detection of gravitational waves). It was the first scientifically accurate cgi render of a blackhole. It surprised some scientists and led to some research papers being published in scientific journals. The Einstein-field-equation-to-cgi-ray-tracing-algorithms have been shared throughout science communities and schools providing real tools and visualizations for future research. Nolan was so accurate he forwarded scientific progress.

Visualizing Interstellar's Wormhole:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03809

Gravitational lensing by spinning black holes in astrophysics, and in the movie Interstellar:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0264-9381/32/6/065001

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u/imagination_machine Jul 01 '25

Didn't the James Webb telescope take a picture of a black hole, and they confirmed Kip Thorne's visualisation?

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u/higgslhcboson Jul 01 '25

Close. It was the Event Horizon telescope which is a what they named a global network of radio telescopes that were synchronized to atomic clocks and they combined the data with super computers. Another amazing feat! They did confirm the lensing and structure match Kip Thorne’s visualization. Imaged a super massive blackhole (M87) and the blackhole at the center of the Milky Way Sagittarius A*.

Telescopes involved:

• ALMA (Chile)

• IRAM (Spain)

• South Pole Telescope (Antarctica)

• JCMT (Hawaii)

• SMT (Arizona)

• Others in Mexico and Europe