Build Character Interactions in Storyline

May 22, 2012

I've been testing out character interactions using photo characters in Storyline and built a screenr of some of the best practices I've learned. Below are a few takeaways you'll get from the screenr.

1. Build out your interaction in a separate scene

2. Create a second "scrub" scene where you take photographic characters with "states" applied to them

3. Use triggers on the interaction slide to change the states of characters

I'll also do a few more follow up lessons showing some of the other best practices for character interactions. If anyone has some other ideas for how to approach this, I'd love to hear.

I hope you find this useful!

Cheers,

Bryan

eLearningArt

P.S. The screenr will follow in the 2nd post...

17 Replies
Bryan Jones

@simon  - Thanks. States do rock

@jeanette and @david- Yeah, the reusability of these is great!

@patti and @susan - My pleasure. Happy to share

@kathleen The cool thing about this is that you can do this for any images. I went ahead and applied the states to a few industrial characters. I used 4 poses: listening 1, talking, listening 2, and doing. Check out the screenr below and let me know if this is what you're looking for. I'm open to suggestions from the rest of the community as well.

Thanks,

Bryan

eLearningArt

Bret Deardorff

Bryan, great stuff. I have purchased a bunch of your images and was wondering how to best use them. I really like how you set these up in your two video demonstrations. That really helps me understand how to use them. I suppose you could create a library of your favorite aviators and just keep them in a storyline file and then copy/paste or insert them into your various projects.

Thanks for sharing.

Bryan Jones

@brett - Thanks. I hope the images are working well for you. Storyline really opens up some interesting ways to use characters.  I think the key with how you group the characters with states into proper use cases. For example, are you building training where you need the character to act as an avatar or one where the character is interacting with another character, etc. Those will have different pose requirements.

Once you have your use cases set up and your characters with those states built in, it's really easy to drop a new character into an interaction. Here's a follow up screenr showing how you can copy and paste the trigger interactions from one character to another.

Best,

Bryan

eLearningArt

Bryan Jones

@maneli Thanks. My pleasure.

@asif Tom has a couple of great blog posts showing how you can string interactions like these that follow the "3C" model into a longer course (e.g. 2, 3, and 4 choice options mixed in along with other static slides, advanced hyper-linking etc). Interactions like these become the base asset that you can build on top of to create some really cool stuff.  What exactly are you trying to do? Your reference the animation site makes me think you're looking more at animations than interactions. Is that right? If so, let me know and I have some ideas in screenr I can put together for you. Have a great weekend! 

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