Gonna slightly derail this thread, but as I am The Doctor - I think it is allowed. I really want to start learning 3d modelling/animation - mainly due to me having access to Maya thanks to the university, but I have no idea where to start. I have done some dabbling before, but nothing too fancy - mostly just some really crappy models that I probably didn't even do right. Lightsabers got me started with AE & Photoshop, where could I start with 3D?

kinda vague, but subdivision modeling tutorials for maya area all over the place. There used to be a site called "Subdivisionmodeling.com", but it no longer exists. HOWEVER, some nice people were good enough to back it up before it died, and their primer is online here:
http://www.blendernewbies.com/tools/sub … page1.html
It is a good resource. If you haven't read it already, read it.

EDIT

Because I'm a derp, I forgot to check the most obvious place first: the page of the guy who wrote the primer. Sure enough, he's got an updated version of the primer and a few other nice tutorial things (more instructional than tutorial, really) on his site:
http://southerngfx.co.uk/

All good ideas, I'll have to do some testing.
Also, youtube kinda messed with the quality.

Easier than splining a path through a squrimy tube. Just a thought.

I had the same thought as Teague a week or two back when (I think) you mentioned this project in an off-hand comment in another thread...Cards with a feathered edge around a central hole, and I think that could be done in After Effects with a bit of scripting to organize your cards as 3D layers along a nurbsy-spline path.

In Max-- and thinking more about how they've done it for the show-- there's got to be a cloud/fog simulation running that you couldn't really expect static textures to mimic. I've only ever used partivolume fogs, so I can't immediately suggest The Best way to get the photoreal cloud look. One that occurs to me is to produce a few cubes or spheres full of animated volume fog, export them as Mental Ray proxy objects, and then use those as particles in a much lighter pFlow system.

There may also be a way to create a cloud-ish Mental Ray material with sub-surface scattering that would react to light the way the real effect does, and then you simply build the partcle system with blobby shapes of that material.

edit2
Third idea: create a texture mapped material and a 2-D animated, wispy, highly transparent texture for it.  Then apply the material to your tunnel mesh, using face-mapping (so every mesh- face shows the wispy texture map) and copy the mesh several times, each time growing the tube diameter a bit.

I did try to add lightning flares, but seeing as the texture is always facing the camera, there's no real depth(volumetrics) to help sell the effect either, I'm afraid.

I'd probably avoid particles pretty far into this project, and do it with a bunch of circular cloud cards with a feathery hole in the middle. Like, forty or fifty of those (you could set it up as a batch action in Photoshop, and just print out fifty different ones) and string them out into a tunnel in the 3D software.

I'll do a test a bit later today if I have time.

Here's a crude, rough test. It runs for about 30 seconds, but you get the gist of it after like...3. Nothing's really set in stone here, but I'm looking for a few pointers.

I'm using 3DS Max 2012 with Particle flow. There's a cylinder mesh deformed to a nurbs curve, with a particle flow emitter set to use said cylinder as an emitter object. The particles are custom clouds with a static material, facing the camera.

It's really boggling, since there are millions of particles, and they're not exactly rendered with lightning speed. It's more like a 1929 DeSoto.

Any help is appreciated. Like, tips on how to do it without particle flow, or with less particles.

-EDIT: Feel free to move this to the creations board.-