Melting Candle

Melting Candle VFX (Houdini + Redshift)

A simple hard-surface model of a candle holder and a candle stick:

Texturing was done in Substance Painter. I wanted to give the candle holder a worn metal feel.

Wax drop setup was done by running a condensation simulation:

Candlewick burn animation is entirely procedural. It is controlled with custom VEX ramps that blend noise values on point geometry based on flame position. (See video below)

Melt simulation ran on candle wax geometry. A sphere with noise displacement is used as a heat source and a smaller sphere geometry is used as a particle sink to create a hole around the flame.

Candle wax shader is a basic sub-surface scatter material with its specular roughness mapped based on the temperature attribute of the geometry. This means that the area of the candle with greater temperature will appear more glossy making it look more like liquid wax at the bottom of the flame. The candle wick material is controlled by custom color attribute ramps mapped along the Y-position of the geometry.

Candle flame simulation made with "Pyro configure billowy smoke" node setup. And a small VEX (volume wrangle) snippet to create a flame "blow out" effect at the end.

The light setup of this scene consists of a low-intensity HDRI light dome for ambient light, a high-intensity area light for backlight, and an overhead area light to simulate the warm light contribution of a candle flame. The overhead light intensity is overlayed with noise to get a flicker effect. Additionally, I created a channel wrangle to get a more gradual fade in/out of the light intensity (see images below).

To sum up, here is a quick project breakdown montage: