Designing the 7-bubbles animated cursor

Video on making the cursor

This video show the entire process from creating a 3D models, adding a parameter, defining snapshots, converting the 3D model to and animated cursor and adding effects to the cursor and setting hot spot.

The video might be fast, but remember that you have the Pause button and can you watch problematic parts multiple times.

Tips for designers

Download the reference files from the Resources section below and compare your work with the original one if something does not fit.

Remember to add a Complex object to the 3D model and add the individual spheres into that object. Without the complex object, you will have troubles rotating the whole 3D object using the Angle parameter.

Setting grid to 0.05 units can help you set sphere diameters from 3D view easily.

When positioning the spheres, 2 simple transformations are combined: a translation upwards by 1 unit and a rotation around the Z axis. The order of transformation matters, hence you need to manually insert the first translation. It would be possible to simply move the spheres to the position in 3D view, but you'll be unable to position them with needed accuracy (unless you turn on your calculator and get started with sinuses and cosines of n*2*PI/7).

Rotation angles in RealWorld Cursor Editor must be in range -180 to 180 degrees. Hence instead of using for example 270 degrees, 270-360 = -90 must be used.

When converting snapshots to cursor, I am using non-standard size of 37x37 pixels. An odd number is used because I want to have the center of the rotation exactly in center of a pixel (not on a boundary between pixels) and that is because the hot spot (the place that actually counts when you click) is a single pixel. I also use this larger size, because there are empty borders around the actual bubbles and by removing these pixels later I remove the empty space and make the cursor relatively bigger.

It is possible to affect all frames of an animated cursor at once if they are selected and I use operation from the toolbar above the list of frames.

The reference 3D model contains one more parameter - the color of the bubbles. This step is skipped in the video tutorial, but it should not be hard to figure it out yourself if you are interested.

Resources

RealWorld Cursor Editor 2007.1 download page - 3D module must be enabled during installation to make the 3D functions used in this tutorial available.

Parameterized 3D model: 7bubbles.u3d (RWCE 2007.1 needed)

Rendered image 10 snapshots: 7bubbles.r3i (RWCE 2007.1 needed)

The resulting cursor: 7bubbles.ani

Summary

Creating cursors is not a hard thing and while positioning 3D objects in space by specifying coordinates manually could be boring, it is an accurate method and that was needed in this case. The use of 3D has one big advantage: we got a nice and realistic gradients on the spheres for free and it is possible to create similar cursors by choosing different camera angle or lights.