hello all,
you guys on the forum were a massive help last time I got stuck so I thought it would make sense to come back.
basically I am trying to create a candle for a scene. I have been following a tutorial that describes creating a flame as a model with soft body properties and have it look like a flame by creating a material with a colourband and an alpha map.
The problem comes in when mapping these textures to the actual flame. The colours and the alpha map dont seem to go in the right direction. They are just generated textures and i have tried setting them both horizontal and vertical but no luck so far.
No luck so far, meaning you did manage to align the texture but didn’t look good? Or are you having problem aligning? Did you add Emit value to the flame texture? You do need that to make it glow.
As you can see from the image the textures are going horizontally instead of vertically. The problem is when i set the texture mapping to either horizontal or vertical i get the same results. Is it a bug with 2.55? or am I missing something? I can also upload the .blend if that would be easier for you to figure out?
I can give you pointer for 2.49b. I hope it applies to 2.55 as well. The best way to control Blender texture orientations and scale is to use Empty object. Just create Empty object and in candle material find the Map Input tab. Find the Object button and Ob field so that you can link Empty coordinate to texture coordinate. In this case I linked Blend texture. Now you can simply move / rotate Empty object to control where blending takes place.
Other setting you need with candle is the SSS; Subsurface Scatter. The candle light needs to penetrate right through wax and glow. SSS setting let you do that. Also flame do need to have some glow around it. You can do that like you did with the background. I experimented with adding object with Halo on it. But I think the method with highest control of grow is with compositor.
Here is my test image. The lower photo is how candle should look. I had hard time SSS to penetrate deep, and Halo setting was tricky.
Thanks for the pointers yeah it looks pretty bad in the screenshot, i hid other lamps and turned off the sss on the candle to make it easier to see the flame. I will give the way you mentioned a shot and hopefully get the texture displaying how it should. Still baffled why its not working through the normal materials though :S.
UPDATE: Finally found what the problem was. I had the texture mapped to the x y and z coordinates, when i swapped the mapping to z z z it appeared as it should do. Just thought would led leave wat i have found in case anyone has the same problem.
