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