Haunted House Project - Candle Flames

    Candle Flames

    After I somewhat finished working on my 3D Captain's Table project in order to be able to submit it for formative assessment, I went back to work on my Haunted House project because the texturing bit was quite unfinished. One of the very first things that I wanted to add to my scene was tiny flames to the candles because without them, they just looked like glowing sticks. I would like to credit this tutorial on YouTube that I had watched a long time ago, it's basically how I learned to make those flames - Candle Project | 04 | How to create a candle flame in Unreal Engine and Substance Designer - YouTube. 

    First and foremost, I started out by creating the fire material in Substance Designer. I used a couple of Shapes in order to recreate the actual shape of the flame, then blended them together. Towards the top, I wanted the flame to be slightly lighter but towards the bottom, I wanted the shape to fade.

    Once I was done in Substance Designer, I created an output so that I could export the map with opacity. (PS: Before exporting the output, make sure that your exported colour space is set to Raw.) Then, I imported the flame map in Unreal Engine, opened it and unticked the sRGB box. The reason we do that is because the sRBG tends to mess around with the roughness (or the shininess) of the maps sometimes.

    

    The last thing that I did was set up the actual material ball in Unreal Engine. First, I changed the material to translucent so that I would be able to use opacity. Then, I created a SmoothStep for the Mask and I used a random map of waves that I found so that I could create the moving effect of the flame, otherwise it would've stayed static. Also, I tend to use a lot of Texture Coordinators when making fires and flames. What TextCoord does is it basically enables you to alter the coordinates of your texture. In addition to that, TextCoord allows you to multiply by a scalar parameter so that you can change the amount of times it tiles.

Final Result

    

    Basically, the reason I like using an emissive colour for things such as fire is because that makes the flame glow, which is how it would normally be in real life. It just makes them look a lot more believable, despite the stylisation. What I would like to do next is start texturing the rest of the assets that still need to be either textured or fixed (because I had some issues with the texel density).