A candle animation I made about a week ago.
I started with a simple frame-based animation for the general shape of the flame:
I then added a few moving fill layers filled with simplex noise on top of the flame to add some variation to the motion. Some noise layers move upwards, some rotate, they have different opacities and blending modes (normal, addition, multiply).
It seems the most important part here is to have 1 noise layer moving upwards, set to normal blending mode & somewhat high opacity (~40-60%), doing a full motion cycle once every ~1.5-2 seconds. Other noise layers are set to low opacities (~10-20%) and could probably be skipped without much change to the final result.
Then I put a gradient map on top of the flame to add some color:
As a final step I had to spend some time tweaking all the parameters (noise frequency, noise layer opacities & blending modes, gradient map settings) to get a nice looking flame.
