Animation in Storyline through the Morph Transition

Nov 12, 2018

Some time ago, PowerPoint came out with a transition called Morph that literally morphs shapes, colors, strokes, graphics, etc. from one slide to the next. In other words, if you build a design on one slide, duplicate the slide, and make changes to the shapes on the second slide, the Morph transition will smoothly deform the shapes from the first slide to the next.

This transition is POWERFUL for animation. I feel that small animations of this kind are especially important for a product like Storyline. In a sense, the ability to build animations is one of the key features that I feel is missing from Storyline. If Articulate would consider adding the Morph transition to Storyline, it would allow users to animate the graphics on the screen with triggers, and I believe that would open up new worlds of possibility with Storyline.

Is this something you all would consider adding to Storyline?

246 Replies
Phil Mayor

I don't work for Articulate, however, I have been active in their community for a while and part of the Storyline beta since before Storyline was released. I don't like reading some of these comments. From my perspective, I believe Articulate are listening to their users all the time to what their users want. Features take time to be developed and the Storyline 360 we have now is so much more feature rich than the version that was released, with more productivity gains that I cannot imagine going backwards.

As far as the roadmap is concerned from the beta I have seen a lot of features travel through with high velocity from beta to release. Articulate has had huge gains in accessibility and we can now build accessible courses much easier than before, and the roadmap shows that Articulate is continuing to work on all aspects of this. Timeline enhancements so far have been great in terms of productivity and there is more to come to the animation timings and the scrubbable seeker will be a huge help when building courses. Items get added to the roadmap all of the time, and recently I have noticed that when new features are added the solution is elegant from a UI perspective. I would say keep the faith.

Math Notermans

As im doing some work in Powerpoint at the moment, and using the Morph transition continuously, i do have to clarify something that for sure might lead to confusion. As stated by Microsoft themselves: 'The Morph transition allows you to animate smooth movement from one slide to the next'.

What does it do ? It moves elements from pos A to pos B in a transition. It changes rotation, alpha and other aspects when doing that. When an element on one of the slide is not present it fades it in.

Right... can we do that with Storyline. Yes we can !!!!
Not as intuitive as in Powerpoint but you can make it happen. With Motionpaths or the use of GSAP and some proper planning you can make it happen.

Math Notermans

Challenge accepted Gabrielle :-)

Quick first animation of one of the morphs...
https://360.articulate.com/review/content/f7b10fa8-30ce-4a72-8f33-e01d34f2681a/review

Imported all the slides into Storyline.
Then picked the first one and quickly made a function to move and fade 1 of the elements. I am gonna make a video showing this in more detail, but for now first quick setup.

Gonna continue with this in the weekend and make all work with GSAP.
Added the Story and more to follow.

Quick run through of the code...

The 3 elements i renamed to 'char 01', 'cloud 01','pos 01'. Specifically using numbers so i can use it for all elements by passing a number as argument to the function.
animateCloud(argument);

Then in the function i get the proper elements and their x and y values. Both start and end.
And finally 3 lines of GSAP code, hiding the start position element for the cloud and animating both cloud and character with a gsap.fromTo( )
gsap.set(pos01, {autoAlpha:0});
gsap.fromTo(cloud01, {x:startX,y:startY}, {duration: 2,x:endX,y:endY});
gsap.fromTo(char01, {autoAlpha:0}, {autoAlpha:1, duration: 2});

Deirdre Bradley

Hi. Kudos for the obvious knowledge and accomplishment, but I think a key point is being lost here.

It is not that Storyline cannot be manipulated to simulate and produce a Morph function. It is that MS provides that function as a single button push, whereas look at all the steps you had to take to produce an equivalent effect. 

I, and I think others, do not have the bandwidth to go through this amount of work for one simple aspect. The request is to have this made a single, simple feature that could be easily employed.

David Morus

Agreed. It's not difficult to mimic the effect, it's just nowhere near as efficient. Workarounds are time-consuming and also take up timeline space (which is not always pretty to navigate in Storyline). It also can obscure screen real estate as you get into motion paths, fading new poses in and out, and so on. Finally, it doesn't look as good in the end.

Ronald Kerkhoff

I'm a newbie in working with Articulate and the most important feature I miss is morph!! I'm using it a lot in PowerPoint presentations but now I'm making an elearning module with articulate and I can tell you I really miss this feature.

I believe when this feature would be added in Articulate this would strengthen the position of Articulate on the elearning market.

Be aware that not every user are requesting feature enhancements. If it is not there or they cannot use it, users are not using it anymore or they are go to other products e.g PowerPoint or other elearning tools to create there simple animation with morph, as I have read already in some posts here.

My question is therefore. Has this feature placed on your backlog, and when can we expect that the morph functionality will be in articulate? Some of the users are already waiting for years to get clarity on this subject.

Kelly Auner

Hi Ronald,

Thank you for your feedback! I will certainly share your comments with our development team. I don't have an update just yet, but we're still tracking this feature and will be sure to post our progress here. If you have additional questions in the meantime, please let us know!

 

Hi Gethyn,

I replied to your similar post, here!

Carlo Jonson

Hi @KellyAuner - I have been told by Articulate support that you guys count the number of requests of a feature in order to actually put it on your roadmap... the more *actually submitted* requests, the higher the probability it'll make it.    So I'm one of those that have requested this, but I'm part of a team of 20+ that all want it.  Are you saying that you need as many people to actually come on board either here in the chat thread or via the official request form to consider this?   Honestly I think it's time to pull it off of the "we'll think about it" to "ok folks, let's do it"!  Imagine the STUNNING things you could create with this far beyond what you can do now.  It would be a great PR/marketing push on social and not cost you a lot of money to get the word out.  So... shall I request my team to reply to this?  Maybe attach a signed form?  How do you want us to submit?