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Advanced Lighting Effects in Flash

Natalia from animacat.net shows us how she creates advanced lighting effects in Flash. To start off this effect, first you need your assets. So here we have a background, which a simple photograph of this subway type ceiling, and a lamp which is a PNG with alpha channel.

So if we go inside this group, you can see I used the brush tool to outline the details in the background. And if we go inside graphic symbol, you can the lamp just a PNG with alpha channel, and the second layer is the outline we made with the brush tool. In this case we moved the registration in the top middle and animated it with four keyframes swinging back and forth.

Alright and for the lighting effect we have two layers with simple round gradients which act as the lights around the lamp. If you look closely at lamp, the gradient moves with the lamp, so try to place the keyframes in the right place to sync up the animations. So for each light object, you notice the radial gradient has several steps to make it look likes its flickering.

Next lighting objects are these giant circles with the same type of graident. Notice that we used zero percent alpha colors for the edges. So if we play the animation, you can see all we did was skew the shape to make it seem as tho the lights are moving along the swinging lamp!

Alright and for the details lets take a look at this fly. So its just a movie clip with a motion path. If we go inside the fly movie clip, you can see the animation is pretty simple, 4 frames of the wing shapes flipping up and down. So if we jump back out of to the scene you can see the fly follows the motion path.

Now lets test out the scene. And there you have it, a pretty simple special effect technique in flash!