Making a Floating Lantern in Blender

In this instructable I show how to use blender to bring a floating lantern designed in Autodesk Fusion to life.

Blender

Autodesk Fusion

Design your lantern! I did this in Autodesk Fusion, creating the metal frame / candle holder as well as the fabric covering. Making these as separate bodies will make it easier to add material properties once we move to Blender.

We'll then save this file as an STL so we can migrate it to blender.

Import your STL from before and take a look at it in blender, you may want to scale it so it fits your workspace better.

Here's a bottom view so I could see that the meshes imported together properly.

Next I went ahead and hid the cloth part of my lantern so I could look at the frame and add in the candle.

Now let's add in the candle. To do this I created a cylinder and moved it into the candle holder of the frame.

Then I created another smaller cylinder to make the candle wick.

Once the candle is done you can add in the flame! Now, there are proper ways to create a flame in blender, but since the lantern has a cloth cover we'll just use a point light to emulate the flame. This is both easier to make, and doesn't require as much processing.

To do this I simply created a point light and moved it right above the candle wick, in the image you can see the settings I used for the light, but you can mess around with these to get whatever feeling you want from the flame.

Now that the light source is done, I unhid the cover and applied a material to it.

I used a translucent BSDF to allow light through without revealing the source inside.

If you just wanted to make a lantern, that's all you need! The next steps are how a made a little scene highlighting the lantern.

To make the background I went into world properties and set the color to sky texture, then I adjusted the settings to make a sunset.

To make the water, I created a plane then went into modifiers and selected ocean. You can play around with the ocean settings but I wanted a fairly calm sea for this scene. Then I went into material settings and set it as a principled BSDF, tweaking the settings until it looked like water.

That's it! I framed the camera and set the render engine to cycles for realism then hit render and voila!