Preloader in Silverlight (Part III) : Bottle filling up animation

Many a times we come across a situation where we need to create an attractive preloader which resembles filling up of a bottle. For eg. If you have a site for some beverage company, it makes complete sense to create its preloader in the form of a bottle filling up to the top. This will be equally creative and will keep the users attention while your service is busy doing the usual data pick up tasks.

Creating a bottle filling up animation is quite simple. All you have to do it show the user that something is going up the bottle. Though you may choose several ways to show this, I choose the simplest way of changing the color of the liquid (path) inside the bottle from transparent to yellow.

First we need an empty bottle. You may get a png empty bottle image for this. I have created a path for this. It is easily created in Expression Design. You may check out my last post to see how we can create complex paths. My path will look like this,

Once my bottle was ready i created one more path in the shape of the bottle till the neck which had a Z-Index lesser than the bottle. This path will act as my liquid inside.

To create a liquid rising effect I filled the path with a LinearGradientBrush, with one gradient stop completely transparent and other gradient stop with a golden yellow color. I just changed the gradient stops gradually which gave the liquid rising effect.

The whole animation was as simple as changing the color stops. J

All you need to create an animation is just imagination. You may download the application from here