Digital Fire is never easy..
 

Anyway I decided to try to do it. Here's the result. Created with nothing but bloke-ish ingenuity and techniques forged by pure optimism. haha, comments and crits would be good on the entire thing though the flame and wick were the main subjects under scrutiny.

**The wicks are straight because I havent got round to bendin them so that doesn't count as crit! :D**

Looks real, impressive.

Ooo very impressive =D

What is the process you used to make the fire? Could you walk me through it a little bit? (just out of curiosity)

Sure. First I tried searching for references on the internet and I looked for the same patterns in all the images of the candle flame I could find, I then lit my own candle. I noticed certain patterns, like where the flame was soft edged or hard edged, what colours it was and where, how see through it was, and how bright it was. I noted these mentally and then created an opacity map and a diffuse map which correspond. I then applied these to a plane, applied certain masking tricks and self illumination, made sure the GI and lights did not affect the flame nor did the flame cast its own shadow and voila!

it looks real :O

Great work man! I couldn't do it xD

Very nice work, it looks extremely realistic.

the maps i used and some mroe insight. Getting used to Graals lighteffects when they were first released is probably what made me able to use these layers and alpha channels as fluidly as I do now.