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I have setup a very basic scene
We'll start with adding a basic spline.
The light tube will follow this line.
Now we make it a nice smooth curve.
Create a circle spline - this will be our emitter.
I'm just changing the colour of the line to see it better.
Now we'll animate the circle along the path.
Now add an Edit Poly modifier to create vertices on the circle.
Our particles will emit from the vertices.
Doing it this way we can easily control how many 'lines' the tube has.
Use interpolation to control the vertice count.
Now we'll create the particles that will make the light tube.
Since our particles are not moving we don't need speed or rotation.
We do need a 'position object' thingy to generate the particles from the circle.
We also need a static material thingy to apply the matrial to the particles.
Adjust the rate so you get nice dense smooth lines.
You will need quite a few particles.
Keep an eye on your particle count by eyeballing the 'total' box.
You don't want to blow up your PC!
OK, that looks alright.
We now need to untick some boxes to setup the objects for (not) rendering.
*** States Sets pissin' me off...
These settings will make our light tube appear 'ghostly' by not casting shadows
or be lit by any other lights in the scene.
Let's make the material.
We set a MaterialID number so the glow effect only gets applied to the tube.
My PC doesn't really render this fast - I've sped the video up cos it's boring watching renders.
We'll adjust the glow a little bit.
You can eliminate the spotty light by increasing your GI settings.
Tada!
Now you can easily change the tube shape just moving the first line around.
Have fun!