Phil Radford shows how to create a classic portal effect using Maya’s motion graphics toolkit and particles.

Take your pick of science fiction or superhero movies, and the probability of there being some portal effect in there is pretty high. Glowing particles swirling wildly in a circle like Dr. Strange is something that which we have all come to be familiar. If you’ve wondered how something like a portal comes together, check out this latest tutorial from Phil Radford who shows us how to create a portal rig in Autodesk Maya.

The tutorial covers using nParticles along with MASH, Maya’s motion graphics toolkit to create a classic portal effect and make it into a tool or asset that you can reuse in your work. Radford often posts a lot of particle and fluid-based tutorials. His last showed how you could create a rig that built smoke rings using the Maya Bifrost Aero solver. Radford offers up the scene file for people to download and tinker. Check out the Smoke Rings Maya File here.