Creating Tunnel & Finishing Animation

Now that most of the animation has been created it was time to create somewhere for the train to go, so we decided as a group it would be a good idea to make the train go into a tunnel.

As I had finished 90% of the train animation I took on the task of creating the tunnel and got onto it as quick as I could. Here are the steps I took to create the tunnel.

To start with I created a plane and placed an image of a tunnel on it so I had a starting point for creating a tunnel, I then decided to use the spline technique I had learned from creating my face.
To create the shape of the tunnel I selected the "Line" tool and selected corner and corner for the line types so it made straight lined boxes. I created lines all around the shape of the entrance of the tunnel to build a structured tunnel shape.Once I was happy with the overall shape of the lines / boxes I right clicked on the bottom right hand box and clicked on the option "Converted To Editable Poly".
This made the first corner box turn brown and was became a solid object.
The next step was to make all of the squares become objects, to do this I selected the "Attach" option in the dropdown list on the right hand side of the editable poly I had created.
A list appeared and I selected all of the lines I had created and attached them to the first line object I had created.
This created an arch for the tunnel ready to start editing & extruding.
Before I could start extruding the object I had to select the outside vertexes and weld them together and do the same for the inside vertexes so that it was a joined object instead of being single objects.
Now that I had one whole object it was time to "Extrude" out all of the Polygons, to do this I selected the "Polygon" option on the right then clicked "Extrude" and pulled the objects out to create a 3D shape on screen.
After I had a reasonably good shape to the tunnel I decided to make the sides smoother to do this I selected the whole tunnel and clicked on the tick box "Split" and selected the smooth area and clicked on "3" and it made the whole tunnel smoother. I also used the "Border" tool to select the back end of the tunnel and clicked the "Cap" option to seal the other end of the extruded object.

Now that the shape was right I decided to add a stone texture to it, to do this I searched on the internet to find a suitable stone material, once I had found one that I liked I clicked on the material editor or press "M" on the keyboard, created a new texture and clicked the box next to diffuse and selected "Bitmap" and found the file and attached it. Once I had the material I clicked and dragged it to the object and UVW Mapped the object to make the material fit better.
I decided to try adding a light to the scene to see if the tunnel would look right when rendered.
I tried two different lighting techniques a Target Spotlight and an Omni with shadows, both worked well but the angle of this first image didnt quite work as I want the light to come from behind the train not behind the tunnel.
After a few changes to the angles I found one I was happy with and this is what the light looks like when its rendered.
The final area that needed to be animated was to make the train go into the tunnel, this was created by keyframing the movements again to cover the distance from the tracks left over to reach the tunnel.