If you haven't already you should check out what's been going on at the Papervision3D shop blog.papervision3d.org. This framework is amazing, and you can do a lot of things with 3D and as3. I went ahead and papervisioned the Disco Water effect and posted the source code. I am using the latest Papervision3D 2.0 source code to make this happen [Papervision3D Public Alpha 2.0 - Great White]. Here is the link to my source, DiscoWater3D.zip.
Disco Water (Flash Effects)
cacheAsBitmap does wonders for these kinds of effects and allows for faster rendering of animation that doesn't scale or rotate.
You can do some really cool tricks with Bezier curve equations and Flash. What the Cubic Bezier equation allows you to do is calculate the _x and _y coordinates along a curve's path. When you run it in Flash you can loop through these coordinates and simulate the drawing of letters, or whatever you can imagine.
I put together a few AS classes that calculate the Factorial and Bezier summations. In the Bezier.as class you will find the method animMC. This accepts a movie clip to move on the stage and also a movie clip to draw the "trailing line". It can be cpu intensive during the calculations if you specify a large "iteration" value in the constructor. However, for curves with less than 4 control points 20 iterations works perfect.
This is absolutely fantastic. It's an entire tween manager built off of Robert Penner's MovieClip Tweening Prototypes including the well know Laco tween extension (http://laco.wz.cz/tween), which is updated regularly, and allows for simultaneous movieclip tweening all in actionscript. This takes actionscript tweening to the next level. No more onEnterFrames and if / else statements clogging up your application. The second best thing is that it is so easy to use!
