Candle Light

[Shredder565]

what's a good, simple way to make it look like these cnadles are creating their own light?

Keep in mind, I've never done anything advanced beyond simple modeling and animation. But I want this to look right

[FXDude]

Constrained/Parented yellow lights with "flickering" noise expression functions on the intensity values perhaps?

[Shredder565]

Constrained/Parented yellow lights with "flickering" noise expression functions on the intensity values perhaps?

If you constrain a light to the candle, wouldn't it light the WHOLE room, and not just the candle, though?

[FXDude]

Oh so you meant the flames themselves!

Well they already look constant, (and consitent with the NPR look of your piece)

So if it's a constant material, you could just bump-up the constant R & G of the rgb values,
and if it's from an ambient value, you could bump-up the ambient, or put a constant shader.

Perhaps my previous suggestion could still apply for the candles to look like they do emit some light around them (with a quickly degrading falloff)

You could also animate the y scaling of the flames with a low frequency noise function, while perhaps applying a quickstretch operator for the flames to react to the characters movement.

cheers

[FXDude]

Actually by re-reading you, i think you meant the candle under the flames.

So without resorting to SubSurfaceScattering,
you can sort-of simulate that by applying a dark (bottom) to light (top) gradient texture plugged into the ambient multiplied by a yellow
(and/or a matching flicker if you have some one your flames)

And as mentioned you can also put lights there,
and you can adjust the light falloff to affect only the surfaces that are around them, and gradually less and less things that are further.

Also, a 2d blurred version of the flames-only comped on top,
might further make them look like they are actually glowing

[NNois]

try adding a sphere with a constant material and an incidence node on the transparency, this would make the halo

[Shredder565]

try adding a sphere with a constant material and an incidence node on the transparency, this would make the halo

I understood everything except the incidence node. And this is the result. I dunno.. doesn't really look bright enough

[FXDude]

Incidence creates a gradient based on the angle from the surfaces to the camera,
typically plugged into reflection to have more of it at glancing angles,

but like in your case, you can plug that on the transparency of a constant sphere making it more tranparent around the edges, that you can put around each candle, to create a glow (in 3D)

[Shredder565]

Ok, I've b een messing around with it more... I think I finally figured out how to do an incidence. And managed to get the halo effect going. I think,. but it's still not looking like it's glowing through the blue phong cube that's giving off the night atmosphere. Here it is without the night atmosphere in effect

[FXDude]

Seems you have to inverse it, transparent part looks like it's in the middle.

There's an inverse toggle in the incidence I think.

[Shredder565]

OK, I'll mess around with it some more.

Also, Here's another question. How come my lighting effects don't take during render using mental ray?

I can even delete the light from the scene. The 4 Cube windows will show the scene as totally dark, signifying that there is no light there. Yet, when I render, the scene is totally bright as if the light still existed?

I'm trying to figure out how to get mood lighting going...But it takes way too long to render when I have to use a transparent Cube phong to do it. Hoping it's quicker if I can figure out the light situation.