Only tangentally related to my Addams Family house project, but after doing the previous render I thought I could probably make a nice render just out of the candles, so I extracted them out and made this:
I made them a bit more realistic because the Addams Family House renders are a more cutesy style by making the flames a bit more of a reasonable size.
I used two sculpted candles and then the randomisation, flame animation, wax mounds around the base, and the wax drips are Geometry Nodes.
The extra wax was done by instancing icospheres and then Mesh to Volume> Volume to Mesh.
The flame animation was done with a standard noise texture plugged into a Set Position node (with some nodes in-between to control the strength of the effect). Each candle gets a different part of the noise because by default the noise texture uses the position as the vector. I just add to the x component of the vector to animate it. I also use a vertex group to make sure the bottom of the flame isn't displaced.
The looping was dony by having a copy of the noise offset by the distance it would travel over the course of the animation, so by the end the copy is where the first noise starts, then I have a Mix node which is animated to blend between the two noises. Starts with the first noise texture and blends to the copy.
Ray.