I've been trying to simulate a candle... particularly the translucent glow that you see at the top of a lit candle, as the light passes through the wax. I came up with a fairly simple shader which uses imported gradient maps in the glow and color channels. The shader took about 10 minutes to make, but this render took around 2 hours on my machine. I'd be interested to see other solutions to this "puzzle", as well as comments and critiques on mine. Thanks

and here's the same image with just a touch of KPT equalizer used in post-work... my favorite photoshop plug-in....

FWT, I was wondering wher you went. Candle looks good! - TJ

Thanks... been playing with Carrara a lot more lately, since I got 3.0 I remember talking about this subject in the Bryce forum a while back, but I never could get my candle to glow... but I was sitting there, watching this candle burn, and it occurred to me how to do it (or something like it) with Carrara's shaders... which are, at least for me, easier to understand and work with than Bryce's DTE. Although, if you know how to play with it, the DTE can produce some pretty amazing stuff. It's just very complicated, especially considering how simple everything else in Bryce is to use.

FWT, I'm still with C2 but you know how that goes I'm almost always the last to upgrade. Well as I recall you were always pretty good with lights, shadows and such. Since you mentioned Bryce you might want to check out my Bryce freebe a utility to turn tif files to pgm terrains. Anyrate good running into you. Hope to see you post more on Carrara forum. I'm sure you will be an asset here as you were on Bryce forum. cheers, - TJ

Here is mine. A little over ten minutes, with render time and tweaking. Nothing exciting, just duplicating the glow.

And an NPR render.

And a look at my shader for the glow and transparency.

TJ... I know what you mean, I couldn't afford C2 when it came out, but I just couldn't pass this one up. Already downloaded your converter and have plans for it, THANKS. Still using Bryce and popping in and out of the forum every now and then, but C3 is just so much fun... Nicholas... I tried putting a gradient map in the trans. channel, too, but didn't like the "glassy" look it was giving... and it drove my render times through the roof. Here's a (rather large) screenshot of the shader I came up with. And, I like the NPR render... I'm still trying to come up with something I like using the NPR renderer... would really like to recreate an Albrecht Durer kind of etching/pen & ink type of effect... but that's another thread....

looking at that, I just realized that I probably could've done the same thing in the bump channel to make it smoother at the top where the wax has been heated... oh boy! more playing to do...

I kind of liked the glassy look. I've used a texture map before. It does give good results, just wanted to play with the new gradient shader:)

cool... I see now how I could've accomplished the same thing using C's built-in gradient function... gotta practice with that and see what I can come up with...

I'd already created the candle for another project using the techniques shown above. Instead, I spent 10 minutes working with the depth-of-field, aura and caustics...

that's funny... I had a doily in mine, but I thought to myself, "no, that looks like something Mark would do."... j/k :D actually, I did have a doily in the picture, but took it out because I was trying to import one that I had created in Bryce as a terrain from a grey-scale map.... but the mesh wasn't good enough, in my opinion (and I wanted the 3d shadows that I couldn't get using a plane and transmap). Then I noticed TJ's converter in free stuff that would help me accomplish what I was trying to do (the "plans" I had for it in post #9)... pretty coincidental.... By the way... nice candle.. :)

EWT Does C3 import PGMs too? Oh boy I'm in trouble now ... some really fine ideas in this thread, and Mark, that doily looks real! - TJ

Hmmmmm, a scan here, a transparency mask there, maybe a bump map thrown in...doilies are easy. Here's a close up of the scene posted above. It's just a simple plane with a shader applied. The plane is the elevated .05 above the table to create shadows. If you haven't already figured it out, I've got some useless fixation on texture maps and shading. A life misspent perhaps....

Added some things, changed some things.

Guess which is GI and which is raytrace only

Thought I'd pitch in too. I made this for the class I taught tonight. Excellent challenge! -Kix

TJ... if C3 can, I haven't found it yet... I had imported an image into Bryce to create the aforementioned doily out of a terrain... which I then imported into C3. Worked pretty good... but not as good as I wanted... terrain came out at like 25,000 polygons... then I saw your converter and knew that would help tremendously with importing the image into bryce.... however... seeing what Mark's did may just change my mind about the whole thing.... 1 plane vs. 25,000-35,000 polys....

FWT, I wouldn't be discouraged; you just haven't got your "C" legs yet - you'll figure out how to do it. - TJ

Well, here it is, a few days late. But I did spend about 15 minutes on this, aside from the render time. That took about 8 minutes.... I built the candle in Photoshop, using cybermesh, which is a plug in that translates greyscale images into dxf models by brightness to height.... I don't know if the plug in is still available, but it seems that Anything Grooves is similar....

Anyway, had to join in. I have been so busy with work, I haven't had any chance to play!

Hope everyone is doing well!

I did some tuning up on my model. DOF, GI, Fixed up the wick, flame, and stand. -Kix

Nice touches Kix. It is good to play... :)

Thanks, I think I'm finally ready to respond to the request to make a flame tutorial but just for this simple candle flame. A few more minor touches and it would start to look pretty sharp. I think I'm going to have to get shader ops to truly tune it in though. It helps a lot to have the real thing to look at when you're modeling it. -Kix

I liked the Christmas tree, Kix.

I haven't done any Carrara-ing in quite a while, but I thought I'd give this one a shot. This image took me a touch longer than 10 minutes - lets just say I had a cold Saturday to kill.

I call this image "Fun with Gradients". I haven't used C's gradients much before, but went all out on this. The candle, wick and flame are all done with gradients - in the color, glow, and transparency channels. Light is provided by a single bulb inside the flame, and a quick Anything Glows on the candle. Rendered without GI in about a minute on my Mac G3/350.

I really like Kixum's pool of melted wax and the melting inside of the candle. I think my flame is not bad, but I'd like to see Kixum's tutorial.

• Jasen.

if anyone's still interested in this thread... I've been playing around with my shader, making it all Carrara rather than using the imported gradients. I really like the turbulence you can add to the gradient, and I think it works well here.