not sure what's up with the activity in this part of the forum, but it feels the staff is on holiday or so
I'll give it a crack to help you out, but i'm in no way an Houdini Expert, and from your description i feel whatever i'm gonna say is just stating the obvious you already know.
From the reference you shared, Star trek for instance, i'd say 80% of the “blakc hole” shots is really just simple geometries, curved tubes/cones, with animated / stretched mapping. Some very detailed fractals with many layers of variations in scale and phases, perhaps even some pre-rendered pyro sims slapped on there as well, but nothing more. Just a guess of course, but sometimes i feel even for the biggest productions, if they can get away with the simplest set up, they will. Whatever works, eh. Now of course there are some extra layers of Pyro on top for the close up parts. But for the black hole i think several overlays of cones with proper textures and then some super good Nuke comping, masking, highlighting, etc… and done.
For Interstellar, same, i felt those shots looked pretty flat, hard to not guess the geometry they mapped those stars onto. I wouldn't even believe if they'd tell me they did it with sims and dynamics…. cause that would sound like quite an overkill for the result, not all that impressive :$ most of it looks like blinking dots on planes (why they blinking, i dunno…). But i wouldn't think too far to guess how it was done. I know they had NASA consultant all over that shot and all, but fact is if your shot looks like an After Effects “bulge” on top of a stars's texture in the end… then what's the point.
I think pretty much every effect of that type, just out of my head, use the same cheap tricks. Don't even think Houdini is required for those, Nuke will do just fine. Even the advengers interdimensional gates and such, they all kinda look flat if you look closely and passed the texturing.
Also, my guess is that when they don't post a making off of the shot to impress the crowd around it usually means no sweat was broken into the process. Assumptions, assumtions, assumptions
Not sure that's all true, but i'd avise, go for the simplest way first and see hwo that looks for you.
A.
