Scott Manley's Wormholes

[stevebowers]

This YouTube video by Scott Manley is very informative and useful as a guide to the appearance of traversable wormholes. He's put together a sereis of models that show how a wormhole would look, assuming various parameters; some of his results look very similar to the illustrations in certain of OA's articles, and they also show the 'infinite flat plane' phenomenon very clearly, which is observable from the centre of the throat.
Perhaps best of all, this is a 360° video, so you can look all round when near or inside the 'hole.

[stevebowers]

For comparison, here's a wormhole image I made a few years ago

[weirdspecter]

Manley's wormhole work is really impressive. As I understand it, he wrote a custom rendering engine to create that video.

I'm curious, Steve -- how did you produce the various wormhole images in the EG? They look great, it's just I've always had trouble producing anything like that using my (admittedly limited) modelling and rendering abilities.

[stevebowers]

Trickery. I haven't got any raytracing skills or software, so I used Anim8or to create these shots. I built a flat reflective surface with a series of concentric ripples in it, then assigned a reflection to that surface showing a background of stars and nebulae. This gave me the curved reflections around the wormhole, then I added a spherical ball at the centre with a different starfield on it. This (more-or-less) replicates the effect created by Scott Manley's raytracing.

A simpler method of faking this effect would be to superimpose a spherical starfield onto the centre of a black hole (as depicted in Space Engine), since that is very similar to the metric distortion around a wormhole. I haven't done this yet, but I'll probably use it at some point in the future.

[ATMLVE]

Thanks for sharing, this video is so cool, was swiveling around my chair watching it on my phone. This is something im not sure I could convincingly replicate in a static image with my own current means.

It would be neat if this was a program that we could download and put it our own textures and mess around with. I haven't looked around to see if that is or isn't a thing.

[selden]

The video’s description (which is below the video) includes a discussion of how Scott created the software which generated the video, including a link to the software on which he based his own program. Apparently he plans to make his own software available via his Patreon page. In principle, at least, substituting textures should be possible. I dunno what license he’ll be using, though.