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https://www.universetoday.com/116500/new-simulation-offers-stunning-images-of-black-hole-merger/ I've got a good feel for creating a material in eevee that bends light around the black center of a mesh, but in the simulation the black portion warps when it is affected by the other black hole rotating around it. enter image description here

I'm not sure if I should try to emulate this warping with deforming the mesh with something like an empty and a modifier or if it would be possible to do it with something procedural in the shader editor. If it could be done in the shader editor it would be incredible, but like anything in blender there are always multiple ways to do it. Any suggestions?

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Refraction in Eevee is screenspace with a single Z buffer. In short, you can not have two refractions on the same pixel.

You could procedurally build the normal of the refraction to match what it would be if it interacted with 2 black holes, but at this point you're most of the way to calculating the entire refractive process and it would cost very little to apply it directly to texture coordinates and skip the refract shader. (or glass shader, point being the refractive component).

Cycles does not suffer from this limitation, and since you do not have any diffuse or glossy surfaces, you do not need many samples at all to get a decent result.

I'd strongly reccomend going with cycles, since it does simulate light whereas eevee is only a rasterizer with a few tricks.

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  • $\begingroup$ Yes. I was wondering if Cycles might be the better option, but have little experience with it. $\endgroup$ Oct 19, 2021 at 15:30

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