Flash help needed! (little trendy floating dots!)

[theHeat]

Just to put this out there, I'm not very experience in Flash, but I'm trying to learn, so please don't shun me for being such a n00b. :frown:

Okay, I've been trying to do this technique with Flash for a webpage header. If you take a look at Shiver7's top bar, you can see the small dots floating around from place to place on specific paths. I'm sure you've also seen this technique all over other sites, I know it's trendy, but I just wanted to explore the possibilities of it and learn how it works.

Here's what confuses me:
- Making it follow a certain path
- Making it animated so it fades in and out
- Making it fade out a certain point
- Making the image transparent

Now the reason I'm having so much trouble with this is that Flash can only use external images with their transparency if they're .png (I believe), which means I can't make them animated outside of Flash and then import a .gif in. To make them fade in Flash, it would have to be in a Movie Clip, right? Since it's a movie clip, I can't figure out how to make it follow the path because I'm still having problems making a freakin' Graphic Symbol follow a path.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I spent some time looking for a tutorial on this, but I'm not exactly sure what those floating dots are. I almost want to call them floating data bits or space debris because they seem to be suiting names, but no matter how hard I google, I can't find anything about how to make them. If you have any advice or a link to a tutorial that might help, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Also, if you know of any other sites that use this technique so I can look at other examples, that'd be great also. I know shadowness.com used to have those little dots in their design, but they've changed it and archive.org can't bring back any of the .swfs.

Thanks a lot!

 

[SiDiuS]

Ahh thats a tough one. I'm not that experienced in flash but maybe you could post on shiver7's site and ask him how he did it

 

[cr3do]

i dont have much time to post but make ur circles covert them to symbol graphic or movie clip and

1. Make them follow a motion guide layer
2. Use alpha (under color) to make then transparent
3. use motion tween to make then fade in and fade out
and insert a keyframe plus motion tween to fade them out at the point u want.
SImpler way to do this thou

pksuperstar69<----- my aim im on often after 6 pm est on weekdays so hit me up with ur question and ill explain to u how to go about it fully