Mesh Flame
This mesh flame was created in Houdini and exported to a mesh and texture that could be imported into UE4. The animation is driven by vertex position offsets sampled from a texture.
The texture containing vertex position offsets.
This mesh flame was created by running noise through a dense mesh as a vertex position offset. This allowed me to create a flame with variable turbulence, but it lacked some of the character the houdini animation contained.
For this prop I created two mesh flames for the candle. The reason for using mesh flames was to cut back on transparency and to give the flame more volume, making it feel more substantial in VR. The First flame was created in Houdini and converted into a game asset, the other was done procedurally in UE4's material editor.