Modifying characters

Arturo,

Someone (possibly Dave?) did a tutorial on this a few months back.

You can change the appearance of a character with just a little bit of work if you have powerpoint.  I'm using PPT 2010 for this.

1. First insert the character you want to change on a Storyline slide.  Then right click and "save as picture." Save it as an EMF file.
2. Now, open powerpoint and insert the .emf file.
3. Select it and ungroup it.  When Ppt asks, YES you want to ungroup it.
4. Now, select it again and ungroup it again.  
5. After the 2nd ungroup, look at your selection pane.  There is one group with over a hundred shapes, and then two other images that are not grouped. Those two are little strips across the neck, one colored and one white.  Get rid of them.  They'll just cause you trouble.
6. Now, ungroup a third time. 
7. Finally you get to do the painstaking work of clicking on the hundred little pieces and recoloring them.

I've attached a file in which I recolored one character to have black hair and light skin.  Also her clothes are now a new color. 

I created an application which allows you to install custom characters into Storyline's Illustrated character menu.

I'm currently developing custom characters in Illustrator as vector's and soon going to make them available to everyone through my website where you can pick and choose the features such as hair color, clothes, skin color, etc... you want to add to the characters and then have the ability to upload them to the Illustrator Character Menu in Storyline.

Paul

Yes I need to change the characters clothes color, let me know asap

thx

I must say I haven't really given much thought to editing the stock characters, so a big thanks to Meryem for posting up those instructions.  Works a treat

This is good advise. Very easy to create new props such as access cards, masks, sterile clothing articles etc in powerpoint and then save them as .emf to import back in SL. I had to change all the blue workwear to green so we could use the characters in our hospital. In future upgrades of SL how great wouldn't it be to have a character editor for illustrated characters, just like the player editor.

My only issue is that all my characters have a line across their neck when I save them as images. Anyone have the same issue?

I appreciate the method involved here, but I think it misses the point.

If you loose the ability to change the character's pose and expression while editing the character, then you loose the power of the character.

What we would like to be able to do is create our own characters, with the ability to change their pose and expression, and be able to re-use those characters across multiple storyline files.  Basically, we want to be able to create characters and add them to the storyline library.

Is this possible?

Thanks, Phil

I saved the character as a .emf, but when I ungrouped the image in Powerpoint 2013, all I got was his head!  The face, body, and desk were gone.  Is this a PPT 2013 issue, and is there another way to do this?

Oh and just to add..... I know I won't be able to load the modified characters back into the character palette.  But I saw the tutorial on how to do it with states. 

Gosh--wouldn't it be a killer feature if they included a character creation where you could customize all colors, features and clothing to create your own avatars?

I don't think it's possible to change the source files, though.  I tried tinkering around with this with no luck.  Plus, it would make it difficult to sell character packs if you could customize the existing ones.

Will there be a cost associated with these, Paul?