character cropping at an angle

Hi Dan - 

There's no really easy way to do that with built-in Storyline tools. Crops will rotate with your object, as you've probably seen. If the conditions in the picture are right, there are two tools that can help but I didn't have luck with them in this case:

1) Make your slide background the image. Then add a shape over the top without rotating and use the format shape menu to fill the shape with the slide background. When you rotate the shape, strange things happen. You might get lucky and be able to create a "sandwich" with part of the desk over the top of your character. This didn't work well for me.

2) You can also sometimes use the picture shape crop tool. Again, you can't rotate these independent of your image object. It didn't work for me. 

Here's what I would do. If you have Photoshop, bring the background image in and carefully mask / cut out the desk portion and save this as a PNG with alpha to lay over the top of your character. If you don't have Photoshop, the free GIMP will also do the trick. Open a copy of your background image in Photoshop or GIMP. Then create two new layers. These will be transparent. Cut your background image and paste into the top most layer. Delete or hide the white layer that's left behind.

Then use the polygon selection tool from the corner of your desktop around the window where you want to create your "sandwich" overlay. 

You may need to zoom in to make sure you get all of the background image selected except the desktop surface. With your top layer selected, click delete. 

Now export your file as a PNG and that transparent part will stick in the file. Once you import into SL, it'll be the exact same dimensions as your background image so you can align them and create your sandwich (background > character > transparent overlay). 

Another option is PowerPoint. PowerPoint offers some surprisingly powerful drawing tools. In a pinch, you can use PowerPoint. Since PowerPoint allows you to edit the points of shapes, you can import your image as a PowerPoint background then overlay your background with a slightly transparent rectangle. Edit the points of the rectangle so that your desk back edge is covered. Something sort of like this:

Make sure your shape is the same width as your image for best results. 

Then change your shape to picture or texture fill with your background as the texture fill. You will need to select Tile picture as texture and use the offset controls. You'll end up with something that looks like this:

Remove the outline and then save the shape as a picture. Import your new overlay shape back into Storyline. Now you have a sandwich overlay. You could even add a right hand frame to it and animate your character from the right if you wanted to within the overlay.

Storyline can do some powerful stuff on its own. Image editing isn't one of the strengths of the tool. Luckily, we have tools like Photoshop, GIMP, and PowerPoint to make things easier.