Overview
A helix at its default settings.
A compressed helix.
An uncompressed helix.
The central torus..
Helix rotation tangents.
I decided to replace the sphere from the tutorial with a torus and the hexagons with helices. These helices are not in the normal poly modeling menu; I discovered them by looking through Maya's Python documentation, and found that I could create helices. The orbit of the helices around the center features a bit of anticipation as they initally rotate slightly counter-clockwise before changing direction to rotate mainly clockwise. As the helices move in and out, they also compress and stretch. While the tutorial used linear tangents, I changed my tangents for the rotation of the helices to be spline tangents. The script generates a camera, point light, and direcitonal light for the scene in addtion to creating and assigning the textures.
Overview
A helix at its default settings.
A compressed helix.
An uncompressed helix.
The central torus..
Helix rotation tangents.
Alternate:
Rendered with Maya's Software Renderer.
I originally wanted to make the helices spin around their y-axis like screws, but coudln't get this to work at the same time as the aim constraint.
The rotation of the helices was originally done by rotating the helices directly but this stopped working after adding the locators for the inward/outward movement, so I changed it so that the locators were rotated. This gave me the desired result of making the helices orbit the torus.