This tutorial teaches you how to create an animated cursor for Windows.
The cursor is created with RealWorld Cursor Editor 2007.1 with 3D module installed.
This guide is intended for people with basic knowledge about RealWorld Cursor Editor. Before
watching the videos, it is recommended to read the tutorials embedded in the application and to try the basic
functions yourself.
1. Creating racket 3D model with parameters
In the first step, a very simple 3D model will be created and then 3 parameters will be added.
The parameters will control position of the ball and rotation of the racket. The racket will be
able to rotate around two axes.
At the end of the video, the created file was saved as table-tennis.u3d.
You may download this file and study it. It will be also needed in the next step. The very final action was a
click on the "Render to Image" toolbar button, which creates a new document and opens it in another window.
2. Preparing animation frames
In this step, the individual frames of the animation will be defined. All frames
will share the same camera and light settings, but the 3D model parameters will
be different for each frame. Using the parameters, the ball will move up and down
and the racket will synchronously rotate to hit the falling ball in the right moment. The
upwards movement of the racket will be faster then the opposite one.
During this step, a table-tennis.r3i
file with multiple snapshots was created. The last action was a click on the "Create Animated Cursor" toolbar button
followed by a click on the OK button, which resulted in creation of an .ani file (opened in a new window).
3. Finetuning the animation
The last step shows how to finetune the animated cursor. The hot spot of the cursor
is moved to the center, the speed of the animation is increased and a small shadow is
added to emphasize the outline of the cursor.
The animation sequence created in step 2 is rather simple. With a bit of patience,
it is possible to create smoother or richer animations. For example this file
(table-tennis.ani (extended))
contains more frames and the racket flips. You can download the source files below.
Another possiblity is to further modify the cursor using the animated cursor editor.
The previously mentioned file was modified in the editor to diminish the repeating character
of the animation. By copying the frames (drag and drop with CTRL key down) and reordering them,
the animation appears not to repeat itself. This actually does not make the resulting file excessively large,
because the .ani file format is capable of storing each unique frame only once.
This tutorial demonstrated the power of parameterized 3D models. The results can be further finetuned
and there is a lot room for improvement. Still, even with this rudimentary approach, the resulting animation
looks fine, due to the realistic ligting and movement.
Yes I agree; they should not add any video in all case.
Anonymous on March 12th 2009
It would be a lot easier if you could implant your voice into the videos :) That way we could understand exactly what you were clicking and know how to make our cursors better. Your cursors are really awesome though! Thanks :D
No disrespect, but these tutorial videos are possibly the most boring videos I have ever watched. PErhaps you might consider Camtasia Studio 6, Or maybe Jing to make your videos.
Anonymous on June 5th 2009
It dosent work, it said it was missing a file or something
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