Where the hell are my diploma multimedia students

I spent most of last week trying to figure out a problem with exporting characters to Torque from Max. This week I've spent most of my time trying to create the sun that will float above Ra's head, the actual object for Torque is easy enough: just a sphere with a billboard through the centre.

The thing that has been taking up my time is the creation of animated flame image I want to apply the billboard. At first I thought I could just get some images or movies of the real sun and some how turn them into a sequence of images I could use for the billboard. Unfortunately the created images need to have a transparent background and I couldn't figure out a way to strip out the current background.
I then decided I would get some flame brushes for photoshop and make a halo of flames that I could then animate. The fatal flaw with that scheme is that once the halo was created I had no way of animating the individual flames since I stupidly collapsed the layers, additionally I have absolutely no idea how to create an animation in photoshop.
Fortunately I did save the individual flames I created as seperate images so I am now using flash to build an animation. See below for what I have so far for the image for the billboard and the sphere for the sun:



Obviously I have quite a ways to go but hopefully it will turn out alright. Once I'm done animating in flash I still need to export as a series of images and stich them together so the animation acan be used in Torque.

All of this brings me back to the title of my post; I'm sure if we had any diploma multimedia students they could get better results in a less time.