First project: Candle heart on table + compositing

Hello blenderheads :slight_smile:

This is my first “project”, which is going to be a birthday present :smiley: I am planning to make a heart out of candles in a glass holder, sitting on top of a table made of blue colored boards. Perhaps I will add some leaves of roses.

At the moment, I am quite confident with the models (not really difficult) and materials for the glass and wax, glass uses ray transp. (set to gloss value 0.85) + mirror, very low alpha (0.05), Oren-Nayar and WardIso as shaders. The wax uses SSS (settings are just experimented, I think it’s good enough :slight_smile: )

Flame is made with particles and get tighter due to an empty with magnetic field enabled. HaloSize and alpha value of particles are animated to get a little kind of fade out.

Rendering takes quite long for the picture (1024x768, 16x AA), nothing composited right now. I appreciate comments and criticism,

Michael Rose

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nice, very realistic looking, but I think that flame could be improved, there is a blend/tut that has a realistic candle flame description

Thanks for your answer.
Yeah, I am looking for realism and my problem is the flame :smiley: I searched for some tutorials on creating a flame and found something which led me to animate the color of the particles.
So, additionally to the animation of alpha value, I animated the color from a dark blue with alpha 0 to blue with alpha 1 and to yellow with alpha slightly decreasing to 0.
The wood planks are a dark blue with a bump map (wood, noise-type voronoi f3, uses some clouds texture as stencil).

Next step will be to create a leave of a rose with nice texture.

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Rosem,

Check out this candle tutorial by Nathan Dunlap http://www.blendernation.com/2006/11/15/non-particle-candle-flame-resource/

It produces a pretty nice candle flame, without particles.
Example:
http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/6214/candletestua5.th.jpg

Thanks for your reply DracoFodder! This tutorial was really helpful to create a more realistic looking flame.
At the moment, I am rendering an image with the heart of candles set up on 4 wood planks but on my Core2Duo 1,8Ghz notebook it has rendered for 4 1/2h until now and finished only a quarter… so it’s very time consuming but as far as I can see it looks fairly realistic.
Will post the rendered picture tomorrow evening (take into account that I’m living in Germany)

Ok, I am done with the project, I rendered the final image with farmerjoe and SSS what produced some artifacts. Did not do any compositing afterwards but edited it with Photoshop.

Final result visible at http://www.bilder-space.de/show.php?file=C8BjBtWqwmkUIB5.png
at full resolution (HD res)