Online Tut. Intro to Maya: Animation Part 4 - Dynamics

I attempted to create the (unexplained) texture Alan used in his render. However I found NURBs surfaces have a fun habit of creating a separate instance of a texture on each segment. So this was the best I could get from playing around with Mental Ray textures which weren't causing the same issue as the blinn. For some reason though a red element crept in that I couldn't find a way to remove.