VSFX 428 Final Project

For my final, I wanted to work on something that would look pretty on a look dev reel so I decided to do a candle flame that involved a little pyro and different particles for melting.

Still Frame 01

Still Frame 02

Render with camera move and final lighting / look development. I used two different pyro simulations one for the flame and the other for the smoke when it blows out. I then used a retime node on the smoke to time it with the candle flames blowing out.

Material for the cake is fairly simple utilizing 2 different maxon noises. The main one is a Stupl driving the roughness and displacement attributes, the other one is a small noise used for the finer bump details.

Stupl noise applied with displacement turned off

Stupl noise applied with displacement turned on

The candle material is also a basic setup utilizing the Redshift curvature node with a small value to make the white stripes run up the candle. I used a ramp to crunch the white and black values and then another ramp to create the white and purple color scheme.

Candle geo after Curvature is applied

Subsurface settings for Candle

Render test for the flame, candle, and cake materials using Redshift

Smoke test for the when the candle gets blown out. Utilizing the same setup that is used in the cigarette smoke in Houdini from: https://pepefx.blogspot.com/2022/01/cigarette-smoke-part-3.html

Lighting Reference _01 : I like the framing of this shot

Lighting Reference _02 : I like the overall mood of this image with the main source of light being the candle.

I found a few different tutorials to help with the different aspects of this project. I will also be referencing Exercise 2 Particle Disintegration for the melting portion.

1. Candle Flame: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPfG5lnLnhY

2. Melting of Wax: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5-0PDvsBzs&t=659s

References

I like the idea of a birthday candle because you can actively see it melting in real-time as well as see it get blown out here are some references for what I want to achieve.