Torch light.

Hello!

I made this torch right here:

I also created an embers material which has pulsating glow. It all looks nice and ready to be used on my scene.

However, I’ve stumbled upon a problem of creating lighting for this torch. Here’s what I tried.

I have lanterns on my scene which look like this:

As you can see, the lighting is really nice. So I thought, I could do the same with the torch!

First, I put a stationary point light to where the flames are. 50 lumens bright with 600 attenuation radius. I also adjusted its source radius to 6 and length to 8 to match the shape of the torch fame. Then I placed another, static, point light at the same spot, with brightness of 20 lumens and disabled “cast shadow”. The reason is - I don’t want to have complete pitch black shadows around the torch (this effect was successfully achieved with the lantern).

As you can see on the screenshot below, the result was… not great.

First of all, the shadow is incorrect for whatever reason. Second, the shadow look ugly regardless if it was correct or not.

Then I tried to disable “casts shadow” on the torch mesh (disabling it on the light source is not viable because I need to have shadows from surrounding objects). And the result was awful again! Wooden shaft of the torch starts being illuminated from the light sources above.

And on top of that, in both cases I have an EXTREMELY brightly lit inside area of the torch. So much so you barely can see embers and flames. And most certainly can’t see how embers are glowing with ever changing intensity.

261403-torch-4.png

I’m looking for ideas. How would you, people, go about creating lighting for this torch?