I hope you all know how much I love you. I just wrote this entire post, and lost the whole thing, and now I’m starting over. Well, we are releasing a new trailer soon and it has this cool animation in it. I thought I would take the time to show you how it’s done. You start off by making some clouds in GIMP. I know Photoshop is the industry standard for professional digital art, but trust me, this is easier in GIMP. Start with a blank 256 x 256 file. And make the cloud textures with this option:
When you have a cloud texture, give its layer an alpha mask, and select “grayscale copy of the layer” to create the mask.
Then–and make sure you’re not editing the mask–fill the layer with white. It should now look like this:
Save that as a png file. Do that three times with similar but different patterns. Import them all into Flash. Take one of your cloud textures and put a bunch of copies onto the stage to cover it and then some. It should be white on white, and therefore impossible to see. I put a black rectangle on the layer below so you can see what it looks like, but don’t do that to yours. Turn all of those tiling clouds into a single symbol and delete the symbol off the stage.


