I'm at a bit of a dead end here. What i have planned is to make a spiral. I know how to load up the trans map for the material. I made a cyliner, applied the transparency for the material, and rendered it. The spiral does not come out as a continous spiral. Any suggestions on how to fix this. If anyone could post a correct transparency map to use it would be much appreciated.

Can you show an example what goes wrong? And maybe tell what sort of spiral you need? Spiral is an easy to build model, even a sort of primitive in the free version of Cinema 4D. So maybe the easiest would be to model one and send it to you.

One day your ship comes in - but you're at the airport.

Here is the transparency map that i used and these are the results that it gave. i very close, i know it.

You got a common problem there. If you open your map in a graphics application and tile it, you will see that you get the same result (except that it will be in 2D of course :) as in your Vue image. Here's my try that should work: