It looks like a lot of what's missing here is lighting in the tunnel, and then, once there's lighting, the illusion of depth into the swirling fog. What you have here is rather flat.

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.

Lighting, not lightning. Though your point still applies.

Max user and old-school DW watcher (if not 'fan') here.

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.

Last edited by drewjmore (2012-05-01 19:34:08)

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?

Teague; considering my nurbs curve is the source which all elements are animated to, I wouldn't call moving objects past the camera easier, but sure.

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