Jack Trotter

I had another abandoned house that I captured in Oregon at about the same time as I  was finishing my abandoned houses of North Dakota project, but it wouldn’t be until another year later that I’d get around to deciding what to do with it. I really wanted to do something different and abstract so I came up with this. The previous abandoned houses world I captured the blissful dreaminess of the grass hills, this one I went with the opposite. What’s more dread inducing than the impending doom of a black hole? I also thought making a black hole that didn’t require any fancy shaders would be a fun challenge. Uploaded on 6/7/2024, It’s currently at 10k visits and 650 favorites. At the time of upload it had made it to the top 50 in the New and Noteworthy section of VRChat. It is compatible with both mobile Quest and PC.

I really wanted to make a nice looking house exterior, I think my previous attempt I failed to really do the main house any justice, this one is much more visually polished than before. Blender has alright texturing tools but not as good as Substance Painter which is what I textured this new attempt with, I also improved the modeling detail a bit too.

For the exterior I utilized graffiti decals that I found while exploring and took pictures of, as well as a few of my photogrammetry models. For the interior there are also some improvements, I found a much better way of projecting the 360 images onto the meshes (I would have saved so much time if I had known this before too, it’s faster) there is much less distortion in the textures and the proportions are much more accurate. The previous houses I did entirely by eye!

The black hole is fairly simple, I just rotated an image plane along a curve to create the light warp effect. In hindsight I’m not sure why I didn’t use a circle instead of the square plane, but either way you can’t see the corners. I created the swirl texture in gimp and the event horizon is a couple of inverted spheres to create a ring that can be viewed at any angle.

The final surprise is the moon being sucked into the blackhole. I created this using the cell fracture add-on in blender, and then in unity using a script that I vibe coded with ChatGPT that pulls the pieces in towards the black whole when they get within range. It’s pretty basic but it gets the job done.

In my projects, I believe using a dynamic sky is important, as opposed to just using an HDRI, I want people to be mesmerized. I’m really proud of the clouds I made in the abandoned houses of North Dakota project and I wanted to do something similar here. I made a sky dome using just a bunch of particles to simulate the stars twinkling and the nebulae shifting and fading, I think it’s very relaxing despite the circumstances involving a black hole, like the conflicting peacefulness within the chaos of the universe.