Does an exit animation dooms the object to disappear at the end of the timeline?

Aug 05, 2015

I have a caption over a screenshot.

I want it to go away with a nice fade when the user clicks inside it.

Unfortunately it disappears on it's own at the end of the timeline.

Is there a way to avoid this besides stretching the time line to last longer?

Right clicking on the timeline does allow me to "show until the end of slide" but it's still dependent on how long the timeline is.

16 Replies
Jean-Philippe Côté

Thanks Leslie.

I had found this thread earlier and the situation is actually very similar to mine and the reason why it triples the workload is the same : I'm making a help tab.

I know it will work with the timeline, what I want to do is the exact opposite. I want the exit animation to be completely independent from the timeline.

I want the object to slide out when and only when the user clicks on it again, may it be after 10 seconds or three hours.

The entrance animations can be controlled by triggers and whatnot but the exit animations are totally dependent on the timeline. As soon as you have an exit animation, you HAVE to stretch out the timeline to what seems to be a "safe" duration, otherwise the object will exit on it's own completely disregarding the absence of user input.

I find Articulate to be an extraordinary piece of software but it's quite lacking in the animations department and how to control them.

I wish there was a simpler way to do this without multiple layers. It's just text in a caption that comes and goes as the user pleases...

Jean-Philippe Côté

That's alright, I'll find a workaround or just leave it out until I find the time to implement it.

What I actually need would be some kind of "disregard timeline on exit animation" check box on an object so I'll definitely put in a word though.

Thank you very much. In my opinion the community is just as extraordinary as the software. The whole package is amazing.

Tim Milke

I found this thread in search for an answer about the exact same question.

I have 8 textboxes hidden by square shapes on screen with a "wipe" on exit to give the squares a windowshade-like effect.  I couldn't figure out why they were all triggering on slide end.  I just wanted the user to click on each object to show the text.

What I ended up doing was to put a timeline pause trigger one second before the timeline end.  It's not perfect, but it works.

 

I would love to have a more permanent solution like Jean-Phillipe mentions.

Leslie McKerchie

Hi Tim!

As you can see here, I did not get a chance to check out the file and understand what the user was experiencing. If you wish for us to take a look, you are welcome to share here.

If you are reaching out about the need for a feature request, then you are welcome to share your thoughts with our product development team here.  

Nora Murphy Silverman

Hi there. Resurrecting this thread to see if someone can help... I applied "Show Until End" and "Show Always" to the object, thinking that would divorce the exit animation from the timeline. But that doesn't seem to work; the object still exits at the end of the timeline if an exit animation is applied. Can anyone explain why, and let me know if there's another workaround besides pausing the timeline? 

Walt Hamilton

The why is pretty simple. The exit animation is designed to be finished by the time the object is supposed to be gone. Therefore a one second long exit animation has to start a full second before the object disappears, or it won't be seen. The program has to anticipate when that will happen, and quite naturally assumes that it will be when the timeline ends, if not sooner, so 1 second early, it starts. Objects without exit animations aren't required to exit, so they don't. they just wait for the slide to exit for them.

One simple workaround (if you can use it) is rather than have the object disappear, is to have another object (with an entrance animation) appear that covers it.

Or, try using states. In the attached sample, the blue box has an exit animation, and disappears at the timeline end. The red box's visible state has an exit animation, which plays when the state is changed, but not when the timeline ends.

Nora Murphy Silverman

Hello again. Thank you again for your help with this. I'm still having trouble. I'm trying to recreate your example, but in my project, I can't apply an Exit Animation to a Custom State. When I edit a state, the Entrance Animation and Exit Animation areas in the ribbon are grayed out. I can't figure out how you were able to enable them in your project when editing the Custom State called "New State" on Rectangle 2. Any help you're able to give would be so appreciated. Thank you.

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