Welcome to the GitHub page of the MoleHole project! This project is all about the simulation of cosmic objects and especially the visualisation of black holes. For the rendering of these objects ray tracing and ray marching is used in an OpenGL environment developed with C++.

For getting a view of the application, a screenshot of it is provided.

One has the possibility of adding scene objects to a scene, such as black holes, spheres or meshes. Those objects have various parameters which may be changed. Furthermore, objects can be selected and transform as well, where a selected object is highlighted in the viewport (6) and seen in this menu.

The debug window provides some utilities that include the adjustment of bloom parameters, the enabling of a varierty of effects. There are also debug layers to add to the visualisation. Those are: rendering of gravity wells, object trace paths for a simulation and PhysX debug layers. The debug layers should help a user understand effects and theories, such as General Relativity. The first two debug layers are showcased in the Examples section below.

These are the settings for the camera. FOV and speed can be adjusted as well as the default parameters position, pitch and yaw. There is also an option for enabling the third person camera as seen in a screenshot furhter below.

With these two icons, one may start, pause and stop a simulation. A simulation currently supports the visualisation of the effect of gravitation with an addition of object trace paths.

For easier navigation, a sidebar is implemented, where each window may be toggled. The settings are also accessible from here.

This is where the magic happens! All configurations and adjustments of parameters will take their final form in the real time rendering in this window.

This project mainly aims to develop scientific skills, so scientific accuracy is obviously very important to the team. The most important theories for this project are the theory of general relativity, the doppler effect, blackbody radiation, accretion disks and their temperature as well as Newton's theory of gravitation. Other theories and effects the project aims to implement in future are tidal forces and particle simulations for the formation of accretion disks.

Rendering techniques include Ray Tracing, Ray Marching and Anti Aliasing.

A few examples of the application are included below. There are pictures of the visualisation of spacetime curvature, paths for objects in simulations as well as camera perspectives.

If you are interested in the scientific background of this project, check out the section Papers. Currently, there is only one paper available, which was handed in for the "Jugend Innovativ" contest in Austria. (https://www.jugendinnovativ.at/) But there are more to come!

For information regarding the development, refer to the Developer Notes.