Here’s the other part for the two-part tutorial series on creating hydrothermal vents in Blender.  Hope you learn something from it!

 

Final Result:

BlackSmoker2

 

CG Textures has some good sand/dirt textures for the area surrounding the vents.

Blender HD Tutorial on adding shaders to smoke

Kent Trammell’s jellyfish tutorial on Blender Cookie uses the much better chromatic aberration method

Latest Blender builds