Turning Storyline static characters into animated characters.

Jul 04, 2012

Paul Figueiredo
By Paul Figueiredo

After installing Storyline on my system at work, I began working with the static image characters. They're very easy to use but I wish Articulate had come out with a way to make these characters come to life. I managed to use a couple of cost effective programs to convert these static characters to animated characters. After several attempts at using different applications, I managed to simplify the process and now I can animate all the Storyline characters with ease.

47 Replies
Stefano Posti
almost 12 years ago07/05/12 at 2:42 am (UTC)

Yes, I use it all of the time, but what you get is a video file (still usable in storyline, though); when you put a video in a slide, it takes a part of the screen, and it's not an object with a transparent background that you put whatever you like....

Furthermore, each video produced by Dell Avatar Creator must be edited to join different character poses like in Paul's example;

I think Paul's solution is flash based, so it's even transparent and very usable in object states, like Bruce suggested!

Let's see!

Paul Figueiredo
almost 12 years ago07/05/12 at 7:47 am (UTC)

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to reply back and answer some of your questions.

Stefano is right. I did use a flash based solution which made the animated character video background transparent which gives me the ability to place the object (characters head) on top of the existing static character.

Nancy is also right. I used CrazyTalk Animator to create the voice sync, eye and head movement. I was thinking of animating the characters full body but this would take more time to create. Most of the projects I work on are time sensitive and the quickest way was to just animate the head of the character.

Just a quick update before I release the tutorial. I used several software applications such as Photoshop to crop and clean up the static characters head and eyes. CrazyTalk Animator for lip sync, head and eye movement and finally Adobe After Effects to make the background transparent.

Once I cropped and cleaned all the static characters head in Photoshop, I used CrazyTalk Animator to line up all the facial features and saved each character for future use. This took a bit of time but now that I have all the characters saved in CrazyTalk Animator, I'm able to add any audio files and add them to Storyline very quickly.

Just in the process of finalizing the step-by-step tutorial.

Thanks.

Paul

Stefano Posti
11 years ago03/27/13 at 1:57 pm (UTC)

Hello there, here are a few updates:

crazytalk 7 is really easy to use and produces very good quality output;

You can take a look at a test movie (mp4) here

I produced it using the Crazytalk 7 trial version, so it is watermarked.

Crazytalk 7 output, though, still need post-production work to be used in Storyline.

You should use a video tool to produce a alpha-transparent video or animation to insert into our Storyline Project.

Once you have done an alpha-transparent (please read "background-transparent" video) you can easily use it for character states.

Check out this very simple example: I used the Dell Avatar Creator (an old free software by Reallusion, not rich in quality and in image/ivdeo size, while Crazytalk Pro does this work perfectly, with multiple files)  to show how to use a "transparent" video.

Please keep in mind that alpha transparent video do work in flash and Articulate Mobile iPad APP, but they DO NOT work in Html5 because those videos are converted into .mp4 files ... not transparent!

www.projitmultimedia.com/storylinesample/avatar/story.html

you can download the .story project here: www.projitmultimedia.com/storylinesample/avatar/Avatar_Test.story

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.