ABSTRACT
Introduction In this tutorial we will create, shade and animate a realistic candle flame. Because the flame will also illuminate the surrounding areas, we will have to add lighting to the scene that ties in with the animation of the individual flame. Even though we already have the initial candle built, due to the way the light penetrates the wax, we will fake sub-surface scattering – a method to describe the way external light illuminates a material internally, or else the resulting effect will not look realistic. We are faking this method instead of relying on 3ds Max’s Mental Ray SSS Shader (3ds Max 7) as we will gain more experience handling multiple nested maps in Standard materials than simply applying a shader to our object. Firstly, we will create the flame using simple modeling before using animated modifier gizmos to generate the animation. The flame’s material is relatively complex but shouldn’t take too long to generate; however, the candle’s material is slightly more complex due to the amount of masking and nested gradients needed to generate the desired result. But before we start designing the material, we must look at the way the flame is displayed depending on different exposures, because if the exposure is too high then the nice scattering effect will be lost.
