I am a designer with a challenge right now for a flash-based site. I need to create some realistic looking sparks and lighting effects. I’ve seen a few sites that do this well. they seem to be bitmap anims on some sort of alpha cause they can go over any part of the site with really cool transparency effects.
Where do ppl get these things? What program could produce sparks and lights on a transparent bg to be used in Flash?
you can create the sparks in photoshop and use a frame by frame animation to achieve the animation you like.
All you would need to do is save them out as png and import that into flash. You could even have a few layers in photoshop that represent the animation sprites then take that into image ready and output those frames as png files or as a swf with lossless32 with transparency so you will retain transparency in flash and have your frame by frame animation ready to go.
Another way would be using After effects or some sort of post production effects application to get some particles or smoke/spark effect happening and then import that into flash, only problem with that, that i know will be retaining transparency.
