Forum Discussion
Rotating an Image using States
I have question regarding states:
I want to create a dial that rotates according to a variable value. I have the variable working well, but want to rotate the pointer using the states feature. When I edit states, then add a new state, I am unable to rotate the pointer object that I had created. I can get it move to different places on the slide, but the rotate option is grayed out. I also note that "free rotation" function I use in PowerPoint is also not supported.
Any suggestions?
Hi Rebecca, thanks. There was no reason to make the hotspot completely transparent. Lazy as I am, I just copy&pasted a hotspot from another file I had open and this one happened to be transparent. I agree, using the default (greenish) hotspots would make it easier to see/reposition them.
oh, OK. You're so savvy that I thought sure there was some reasoning I was missing. Tx for the info...and again for the sample.
Nice to see more contributions to this thread. Just to complete the circle, attached are the results I came up with using Jeanette's suggestion to rotate an object within each state.
Michael Hinze said:
Michael, thanks for sharing your file. To get a really smooth rotation, this should probably be done in Flash or as a 3D rendered video from some3D software. But doing this in Storyline doesn't look too bad either. I updated your file to have the various rotation states for one of the models as custom states, rather than in separate layers and replaces the two arrow buttons with a slider, which (somewhat) mimics a 'swipe'. See attached file and here is the published version. Hope that gives you some ideas.
Michael,GREAT work! My thought process was stuck on Layers; the use of States didn't even cross my mind! Thanks for taking this to the next level!
@Michael - I'm a little late to the topic, but thanks for a really awesome share!
Came across the same thing. Thanks for the help Jeanette. It worked.
Glad that this conversation was able to help you as well, Tabo :) Thanks for popping in to share.
Thank you everyone for sharing your knowledge on how to achieve this, it has been super helpful.
Hi Jeanette, Thank you for the above fix from 10 years ago. It took me a while to figure out what you meant about duplicating, copying, and pasting the picture, rotating it, etc. Surprised that after ten years, Storyline hasn't evolved to let you rotate an image on a state, and you still need to paste the picture.
In my project, when I used the State panel and the image icon to create new states for an image, it kept putting some of the images in landscape instead of portrait. That was very confusing because the original file had the image in portrait orientation. Storyline kept flipping some of them sideways. Completely annoying. The really weird thing was it wasn't consistent. Even though all my images were in portrait orientation, Storyline would flip only some of them to landscape. Even more strange when I inserted each image as an actual picture into the Story, they came in in portrait orientation just like they are in the file and I didn't need to rotate. Weird!
Just so everyone has the steps to rotate a picture for a state, if it doesn't appear correctly when you add the image to the state using the image icon on the states/timeline bar, these are the steps.
1. Create the object (it needs to be an image for this to work) you want to change the states on.
2. Choose "insert picture from file" on the main top toolbar.
3. Paste it somewhere in your story. I inserted the images onto extra temporary slides.
4. Rotate your image to the orientation you want for your new state.
5. Copy (Ctrl + C)
6. Navigate back to your object.
7. Select the object.
8. Now, in the states panel, click edit states and then click create a new state.
9. On your keyboard, just do the paste function (Ctrl + V)
10. If you need to do any moving or size changes, the image has handles for that purpose.
11. If you are finished, click Done.
Not positive, but I believe your image name and your state name need to be the same.
