Animating Candlelight

[senko]

Can anyone give me any hints on how to light a scene using an animated flame? Is there a way to make particles emit light so the flame would cast flickering light and shadows?

yeah i did such a scene in my early days :)

the thing about it is to place a point light with linear or quadratic decay where the wick of the candle is. Then u should jot down a simple script to add noise to lights intensity. This should do the trick. Do not give it too much of a flicker though. The range should be similar to e.g. Give it a nice warm colour.
1.0~1.2 intensity

i used paintFX in my scene but later found out that the gnomon method is way better using softbodies. Will upload my movie probably tomorrow.

i hope this was useful

Senko

[PDuff]

Thanks alot. Could you possibly elaborate on the script to add noise?

[meanlebh]

An easier, and often more time effective method would be to just render out that light in a separate pass from all of your other lights. Render it un-animated at whatever level is the brightest you would want the light to be...then when you comp everything, use a screen or add function and animate the level that it is being applied at. By doing this you can retime it very quickly and you won't have to re-render any of your animation.

Hope this helps.

-Brian

[jcanes21]

i agree with meanlebh, rendering the light at the highest intensity for the shot, unanimated is the best way I have found to do this as well. render the light out of your 3d package, with no flicker. Then you can use that render as a mask in your compositing package to drive a brightness function. in shake you can plug the following function into the intensity: noise(time)

that will make it flicker as time progresses. you can also make it flicker in a range of intensities by expanding the function.

[PDuff]

Thanks. I'll try that out in AfterEffects.

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