Here's another attempt. Unfortunately the outer glow is making a rather obvious join.
gargantua2.jpg
In this case, the hole in the center of the whirlpool hides a wealth of sins. I also used a tool size just about the size of the whole center area and just kept holding down the mouse button. If I recall, I had to do it twice to get a smoothly round opening.
Here's another attempt. Unfortunately the outer glow is making a rather obvious join.
gargantua2.jpg
--- 90 seconds to Midnight ---
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--- Penguin power!!! ---
Pity I can't just take one of those pictures. Ah well. I think I'll go with the cinematic version, so as not to confuse people. Here's my latest attempt:
gargantua3.jpg
That's looking a lot better now
There's quite a large... accretion disc (I seriously hope that's the right name). Does that mean its quite an active black hole?
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Nice spirally bits! I think the disk might be a bit large in relation to the central element, but that can be plausibly explained in many ways. The current proportions to make it look like Saturn, though. The cinematic version had the disk area as less than twice the central width, if I recall.
One thing that still bothers me a little is seeing the back of the disk through the edges of the central part. It makes the whole thing feel like two distinct elements: a disk around the equator of another disk (you also have what looks like a hard cut line halfway through the large disk; I recommend duplicating the whirlpool and erasing the back parts with a soft-edged brush to get a smooth transition). In this visualization model, the central black area should be behaving as a lens. That ring is actually warped images of the back of the disk, meaning that the ring and the disk should be blending smoothly into each other. One of the reasons why the cinematic version was viewed almost exactly edge-on to the accretion disk is that you don't get a good ring except in that viewpoint (as you move up from the ring, the bottom edge will lens more empty space and get darker, while the upper edge will lens more of the disk back and get brighter).
If you look closely at the online images from the film, you'll notice something else about the accretion disk: its outer edges are actually dark and only start to glow as they get closer (this effect is due to frictional heating of the material as it goes faster on the inner parts of the spiral). This gives a slight dimming effect where the outer parts of the disk cross in front of the lensed images. The whole effect is tough to make from parts.
I suspect that if you pull in the disk size a bit that folks will be able to recognize what you're going for very quickly.
Here's another version with a more squashed disk. It's starting to run into problems now with the bloat tool, as it's becoming a bit distorted.
gargantua4a.jpg
Yes, that's the right name. I think Gargantua is supposed to be a quiet black hole - there aren't any jets coming from it. That might be an interesting addition, but harder to do.
And here's the sort of illustration I wanted this for:
hellsgate.jpg
That's an interesting nebula arrangement you've got there. How did you make it
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Mostly using this tutorial: http://www.psdvault.com/drawing/crea...-from-scratch/
The stars are from one of my starfield attempts. They seem to blend in fairly well.