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.

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?