Project Overview

Experience the physics of a black hole in real time! This simulation leverages modern OpenGL and C++ to visualize the gravitational effects of a stellar-mass black hole, complete with an accretion disk, gravitational lensing effects, realistic planet models and a dynamic skybox. Explore the environment with a free-fly camera, toggle a 3D grid for spatial reference, and view real-time debug information about the simulation’s parameters.

Controls WASD - Basic Movement Q - Down E - Up F - Focus onto Blackhole G - Toggle Grid H - Toggle Debugs LShift(Hold) - Speed up movement Esc - Close window

Key Features • Realistic rendering of black hole and accretion disk using compute shaders  • Physically based calculation of Schwarzschild radius and orbital mechanics • Gravitational Lensing Effects on objects and backgrounds in the world space  • Interactive camera controls for immersive exploration  • Bloom effects and high-quality textures for planets and skybox • Toggleable debug overlays and grid for enhanced understanding

Project Repo

This is the project repository, you can check it out and download the source code, if you wish to contribute to the project please let me know. You will need to download the additional dependency folder for the project to work, I am not sure if it will work im currently in the process of making the download of the project easier:

https://github.com/Clouddeboi/BlackHoleSimulationOpenGL

Future Plans

I plan on expanding this project further at some point, these are the things which I want to add:

• Realistic gravitational orbits - Currently we have fake orbits for our objects, allowing for correct orbiting and tracking of said orbits is a top priority.
• Visual improvements - Add 3d textures such as smoke clouds to the accretion disk of the black hole, improve skybox with nebula's and higher quality imagery.
• UI - Improve debug texts and their performance on the simulation as the current implementation is not optimal. 
• Performance improvements - Optimized simulation to run at a higher render distance and for the compute shader to be able to run stable with a higher step size. 
• Overall project cleanup/streamlining: Improve both code quality and readability as well as minimizing repetitive code.