Hello! Working on making a realistic candle flame and wanted a critique. I'm new to using Pyro and I've been watching tutorials to help me understand what needs to be done to manipulate each aspect of the candle flame.

Attached is a render I currently have in Mantra. Now, I know at least some aspects I need to fix but not really sure how one might go about it, so i'd love if you guys had any pointers for me!

#1 - The bottom of the candle flame where the initial flame shape comes from is showing up as a cube at the bottom of the simulation giving weird harsh corners. I used a sphere to emit candle flames from in the Pyro tab and have been tweaking settings to try and get it the way I want.

Edit: Figured this part out! Had to edit the falloff and border settings in the object source -> Create Fuel Volume Node.

STILL No idea about the other two however…..



#2 - The top of the flame is too wispy and when looking at candle flame references, you see that it's more calm and even slightly rounded. What types of settings would help me with that?

#3 - Most confusing to me at the moment is the color gradient ramp I've been trying to play with in the SHOP network. By default it gives the Candle texture to the flame so it can be rendered, but when I go and tweak the gradient for the temperature color ramp in the texture settings, it simply doesn't give me a seemly correct range. I have the settings to display from 0-1 (from one end of the gradient in the center to the other end of the gradient towards the least hot parts.) It seems to give me one color and one color only no matter how I tweak the range settings and the ramp. I want it to be more blue towards the bottom/center and branch out a brighter orange but it just doesn't seem to want to give me a blue center with an orange outer gradient.

Attached also is the file I've been working with if anyone wants to take a look!

I eventually want to take the candle light into Maya and do a render, because I'm working on a ship cabin at night mostly with warm candle light on the interior and bluish moonlight on the exterior coming in the windows.

Hey shaneroshea,

When I go to the shader under the general tab and adjust the colors there, I can get a different colored flame.

Although only in rendered view, for some reason I can't in scene.

So is it that you can't see it scene view too? Have you tried looking at it in render view? Or maybe you wanting to do something else and I misread you?

Hey BabaJ! I'm able to adjust it so I get a different color in the render, which is all I meant. The issue I'm having with that however, is that in the render, I'm not getting any sort of control over the gradient. So if I have the whole color temperature ramp set up where it's blue on one side and orange on the other, it'll just be blue or orange, depending on which one is first. There's no blue center with orange on the outside for example or vise-versa. This is with the range set to be 0-1 which from my understanding was all you needed in order to control where the texture gets its info from the color ramp for.

Still haven't been able to solve this!

Got that rounded flame bottom! Still working on solving the other two…. >:O