Creating a table tennis racket cursor October 15th 2007

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.

And here is the result table-tennis.ani.

Where do we go from here?

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.

Resources

• RealWorld Cursor Editor 2007.1 home page.
• Parameterized 3D model: table-tennis.u3d (RWCE 2007.1 needed)
• Rendered image 10 snapshots: table-tennis.r3i (RWCE 2007.1 needed)
• The resulting cursor: table-tennis.ani
• An enahnced variant with racket flips: table-tennis-long.zip

Summary

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.

Recent Comments

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Unknown author (2008-03-30): It's Beautiful but i cannot understand it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unknown author (2008-03-30): I am the same author at the top of this letter, i think you must make something easy than an 11 years old can make it

Vlasta (2008-03-30): Simpler videos will be available, but it will take some time...

Unknown author (2008-04-08): ive recently made a static one... how do i get it to be my actually cursor instead of it just sitting the the cursors folder?

Unknown author (2008-04-08): also... how do u change the trail that comes out behind it...
you know! it shows it in the test area and it comes out from where u put the hot spot...

Unknown author (2008-04-08): thirdly... could anyone post any links to ones they have made if there to do with swords, axes or swords and axes going across each other...

Vlasta (2008-04-09): You can use Windows Control Panel or the cursor editor to customize you cursor. There is a big icon for this right on the start screen of the app. Cursor effects cna e set in Control Panel as well.

Unknown author (2008-04-12): kwl

Unknown author (2008-04-12): can we hav a like new god sword making do u recon?

Girl0wner (2008-05-07): i dont understand how to make lil less complicated plox

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