Modifying characters

OK, I followed the instructions above and figured out how to modify a character, but would I need to modify for every pose and for every expression? I'm hoping to make my trainer look more like me and want to use her over and over. Are there additional illustrated characters I can buy? I also want to represent the typical students at my school and they need high tops and hoodies, not polo shirts!

Hi Gina--

Just an idea...perhaps you could use the steps above, but add another step:  search for clip art in powerpoint...a lot of clipart is also 'ungroupable'.  Maybe you could find a clipart character with a hoodie and hightops that you could 'steal' (read:  ungroup), resize, and place over the shirt/shoes of your character before you save it as a .emf or png?  Here's my 20 minute go at it--not perfect, but you get the idea:

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?

did you ned to do all this work for each "expression" or "pose".

Thansk

Michelle

Hey Trond, you can actually just delete that image at the neck...cool, huh?

Michelle--yes, you would have to do each expression or pose...when you use this method, you are basically changing the illustrated character to an image.

Hope that helps!

Hi,

I am just strating to work with articulate. I have to concieve a course of "law and construction". I have to use many different characters (lawyers, judges, workers etc.) To help the learner identify them i am thinking of adding an object (hat, helmet etc.) to each character.

I have used the technique described above. It is quite time-consuming but it works.

However i have a few questions and comments:

- I tried to delete that image at the neck...it just leaves a white mark

- Eventhough it is not possible to add the expressions to the new image, can we not insert all our new images in the bank of illustrated characters? So that we can use them more easily all along the slides? I can't find the file containing all the characters.

-Does anyone know of any other bank of illustrated characters (for free or to buy) that contains more elements?

- Since i can see that many people are creating their own, could we think of a common space to share them? I am ready to share mine once i have created them!

Thanks for your answers and comments back.

Estelle (and please excuse my english, i am french... )

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

Wow, this is a great thing. Never would I have thought of using PPT as a graphic editing tool; I'm too anchored to Photoshop and Illustrator to have thought of this.

I stumbled across this when I was looking for ways to edit the illustrated characters (from this post) and was wondering how the user(s) created spacesuits, etc. - seemed to me the best way to do it is in Illustrator. If you have that program, you can ungroup following the instructions above, then select everything, copy, and then paste it in a new window in Illustrator, and all of the 'pieces' of the character will be clickable like in PPT, but also editable there as well. Perhaps this is an option for those inclined to use Illustrator in order to keep the vector graphic (i.e., sharp/well-defined) images intact. 

Then again, if you want to do something like a spacesuit or a different outfit, you can just create a layer above the character and draw whatever it is you want to create (or import and edit) over the character, sort of like those old-time paper dolls where you could fold their costume tabs over their body. Just match the pose and it should be pretty easy.

Then again Illustrator has a steep learning curve (at least for me; I've worked with it for years and it still frightens me), and I'm pretty impressed with what I've seen in this thread from just using PPT (Brenda's edits, in particular). Maybe I'm making this more complicated than it needs to be. 

Hi Michael! Glad that you found this thread helpful!  Thanks for sharing