hi guys, flash help please :)

A basic rain effect is pretty easy. Rain is perceived not as drops, but as the blur the motion of those drops creates on film.

To do rain, just paint a straight line of a moderate length (you can have a slightly thicker bottom end if you want a more cartoony effect) and make it a symbol. When you animate it, move the symbol as far as the symbol is tall from frame to frame - so if your symbol is 20 pixels tall, it should move 20 pixels from one frame to the next. Repeat a lot until you have the density of rain you're looking for.

Foreground drops should be longer and larger, and background drops shorter and narrower to get a sense of perspective.

You may want to animate several drops inside another symbol, then use that symbol on the stage. You won't have to track dozens of drops on the stage, and you can scale and rotate to get the look you're after.

That just looks like an overlay of a loop. I've had much more impressive results from actionscript with a much small footprint, but that won't work for those of you that convert to video.

When I was starting out in Flash I loved to search and download the examples in the "movies" section of Flashkit.

http://www.flashkit.com/search.php?cat=movies&per=10&page=1&field=Description&term=rain

You can download and see if they work for your application. They are free source sharing of techniques.

Scroll down there are so many ads there now, but there are still some great ideas available.