We provide tutorials for creating custom cursor effect for a flash movie in FlashMX 2004.Custom cursor adds beauty to your animations and enhances the visual effects. It will be very useful in interactive web applications. To produce a custom cursor effect you must first create a movie clip symbol. You have to add some actionscript to your movie clip for performing necessary actions. The flash documents showing the custom cursor effect is also added with this tutorial.

For more tutorials and tips about fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver and Photoshop visit our tutorial page.

For viewing the animations in this site you need to install Flash Player 7.0 or higher and for downloading the .fla files from this site FlashMX 2004 must be installed in your system.

Steps for developing custom cursor effect

Before beginning the tutorial the user must have a basic knowledge about the flash animations such as creating different types of symbols and tweening effects.

1. The first step is to create movie clip symbol. To create a movie clip symbol follow the steps below.

2. Create a new symbol and name it as “new cursor” (to create a new symbol press Ctrl+F8).Select the symbol behavior as ‘movieclip’ from the behavior panel and press ok. You will get a new movieclip symbol named new cursor.

3. Draw a custom shape like the one as shown below. This new shape is your custom cursor.
   
   



4. Select the scene 1 on the top of the timeline window to return to the first scene of your movie.

 



 

In "Scene 1" of your Main Movie

5. Standing on the scene1 drag the new cursor movieclip from the library panel onto the stage and give an instance name to it in the instance text box property window. If the library panel is not open you could open the panel by pressing the Ctrl+L.

6. Select the working frame (in this case the frame is franme1) and open the actionscript window by pressing “F9” key.

7. Type the below code in the action script panel.

Mouse.hide() startDrag(cursernew,true)

 

8. You have successfully converted the custom shape you created into a custom cursor. To view the result, press Ctrl+Enter.