Looping Animations Plus Functionality

Greetings Storyline Community! Today I have the gift of knowledge to share for the holiday season. Recently I was wondering if it was possible to finagle a slide to allow functionality while an animated loop was running continuously in SL2. Turns out that it is and my example will hopefully show you how this is done (Select the image above to see my example).

In the example there are 2 buttons at the top and a simple looping animation at the bottom of a shape with the "Random Bars" animation on the entrance and exit of the shape, that is located on a slide layer.

When you click on the buttons you see 2 separate interactions. The first is a toggle of expanding and hiding a panel that motions out from the right side of the screen.

When clicking the second, 4 shapes are revealed over the looping animation.

Both of these interactions can work without disturbing the looping animation at the bottom section of the slide. However, when the looping animation re-loops it will appear above the 4 shapes. This is a limitation and you will want to plan your looping animations around this.

Making it Work

To get your slides to work like this there are only a few things you need to do:

1) Turn off "Hide other slide layers" for all of your slide layers.

2) Setup your looping animation.

My animation is simple, but you can make yours as long or complex as you want using the same concept. At the end of the animation you want to loop, add 2 triggers that both hide this layer when it gets to the end and show a layer that will quickly tell this layer to be shown again.

3) Make a slide layer called "loop", adjust it's timeline to be as short as possible and add 2 triggers just like you did on your animation layer.

Now you can add any other slide layers to make additional interactions around your looping animation. Just make sure to also uncheck the  "Hide other slide layers" for any new slide layers you add like we did in step 1.

Hope you find this useful and let me know if you have any questions.