One of my favorite metal bands, Savatage. The text object was made with COOL 3D Production Studio, and saved as a transparent .tga file.

It was then opened in Ulead GIF Animator 5, where I did a lot of experimenting with many things, mostly plug-in filters... EyeCandy 4000's Glass effect, and Xenofex 2's lightning, primarily. Liberal use was made of GA 5's Merge Method in the Object Properties.

It may be of interest to note that you can apply a filter to just a selected part of an object...