Can we change the color of a Storyline Character's outfit?

Hi Liliana:

During my testing of early releases of the Articulate 360 Suite, I wanted to see whether or not it would be possible to save the newer Storyline 360-specific Illustrated Speaking Characters to Windows Metafile Format (WMF). 

In Storyline 2, it's possible to do this with the early v1/v2 Speaking Characters, so you can then re-insert them into Microsoft PowerPoint so they can be de-grouped and then customized to great effect.  Things like changing color details on clothing and other character features are extremely easy and do not take much time to accomplish once you get the hang of the process.

This process has no doubt been demonstrated numerous times by David Anderson and his Articulate colleagues during their many Articulate Roadshows (I learned about this while I was in Toronto's session, during the early summer of 2016).

The only caveat to this process is, once you complete your changes, the best you will be able to do is to re-save your finished speaking character as a static graphic image, such as a PNG, for example, for re-importing into Storyline 2 or 360.

These graphics function as Static Speaking Characters, which means you will NOT be able to change the Properties of the character like with a conventional fully-featured Speaking Character that Storyline typically employs, so things like Positioning, Poses, Expression Changes, etc. would be unavailable.

Unfortunately, despite the potential for things like high-resolution SVG support in 360 (?), there is no method I am aware of using the newer Speaking Characters that allows for this kind of customization, which means, as Laurel suggests, Photoshop may be the best way to go regarding those kinds of changes, which, unfortunately, would be more complex and time-consuming, but, at least, possible.

I tried to save one of the newer 360 Illustrated Speaking Characters on a Storyline 360 Slide to the SVG and WMF graphic picture formats, and then attempted to import them into PowerPoint 2016, with little to no success in being able to access these graphics as conventional raster or vector-based image objects for customization.

It's a shame, because it's this aspect that helps to make the stand-alone version of Storyline viable for our organization as a flexible product, and by extension, a business case.

-Mark