7 Pro Tips for Working with Motion Path Animations in Storyline 360
Animations can be a powerful way to explain a concept, tell a story, or make your content memorable. Storyline 360 has a variety of animation options—including entrance, exit, and motion paths. With motion path animations, you can control how your objects move and bring your ideas to life. Here are some time-saving tips to help propel you forward when working with motion path animations. 1. Rename Motion Paths When you add a motion path animation to an object in Storyline 360, a name is automatically assigned. If you plan on adding multiple motion paths, it’s a good idea to rename each one. This will make it easier to identify which motion path you’re working on when editing triggers. 2. Copy Animations If you plan on using the same motion path animation on several objects, save time by copying the animation from one object to another using the Animation Painter. By double-clicking the Animation Painter, you can apply the same animation to multiple objects one after the other without having to click the Animation Painter over and over again. To turn it off, click it one last time or press the ESC key on your keyboard. Did you know? When you copy and paste an object, any animations you’ve added to the object are also copied over. So if you’re using the same object multiple times, add any animations you want to include before you copy it to save time. 3. Sync Using Cue Points As you build content, you might change your mind about when you want your motion path animation to start. Syncing your motion path to a cue point gives you the flexibility to change the motion path timing without having to edit the trigger each time. All you have to do is drag the cue point along the timeline until the timing feels right, and the motion path will start at the new time. 4. Select the Object Path to Edit To edit a motion path, you can select the start or end point individually using your mouse and drag the point to the desired location. If you have multiple start or end points overlapping each other, you can easily select and edit them without having to hide objects from your timeline. Simply select the line of the object path you want to edit. It will turn bright blue while the other objects and their paths will fade. Then, move the start or end point as needed. Did you know? Another way to fine-tune a motion path is to select the start or end point of one or all of the objects and edit the X and Y coordinates. This is great for times when you need to be super-precise. 5. Change the Easing Option By default, Storyline 360 automatically assigns an ease-in and ease-out effect to your motion paths. This controls the acceleration and deceleration of an animation. If your animation needs to move at the same pace across the screen, then you’ll want to edit the easing direction to none. 6. Orient Shape to Path There might be times when you need to include an object that faces a certain direction as it follows a path—for example, a car making a right turn. By selecting Orient Shape to Path, the object will always face the direction it’s moving, even when it travels on a nonlinear path. 7. Use a Relative Start Point Perhaps you want to create an interaction where the object can move multiple times depending on the learner’s choice. For example, let’s say you created a racetrack and want the learner’s car to move forward whenever they answer a question correctly. Instead of duplicating the object and creating motion paths for each possible outcome, you can select Relative Start Point to move the object along the motion path starting from its current position. For more ideas on how to use this feature, check out this tutorial. Did you know? You can add more than one motion path to the same object and have each begin at the new location of the object based on previous movements. For more ideas on how to use this feature, check out this free Storyline 360 download by Samuel Apata. Motion path animations give you the flexibility to quickly create content that’ll move your learners. What tips do you have for working with motion paths? Share your ideas in the comments below. Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning.2 Ways to Share a Custom Storyline 360 Template
Have you ever found yourself endlessly searching for a slide you previously made so you can reuse it in a new project or share it with a coworker? The good news is there’s a faster way! E-learning templates can be huge timesavers, and Storyline 360 makes it supereasy to create shareable templates, but creating a custom template that you can reuse is just one part of speeding up development time—you also need to make sure people have easy access to it. Let’s take a look at two ways to do that. 1. Save Your Project as a Storyline Template We’re all familiar with saving Storyline 360 projects as STORY files, but did you know you can also save those same projects as STORYTEMPLATEs? It’s as simple as selecting the Save as Type drop-down when saving your file. But you might be wondering: what’s the difference between saving it as a STORY versus a STORYTEMPLATE? If you use the STORY file as a template, then anytime you want to use slides from it you have to search your computer for those files—which can be time-consuming—and then import and select the slides to include. On the other hand, when you save a project as a STORYTEMPLATE file, that template is automatically saved under My Templates. This means no more wasted time searching through all your file folders trying to locate the template you need. Whenever you have Storyline 360 open, you can go to My Templates and find all your saved template files right within your project. You can quickly add any of the slide designs as many times as you want. This makes it supereasy to keep your template files organized! You can also share the STORYTEMPLATE file with your coworkers so they can open or import the template to add it to their custom library and enjoy the same ease of access. For more details on how to share and use custom templates, check out this article: Storyline 360: Using Custom Templates. 2. Use Team Slides If you’re an Articulate 360 Teams subscriber, then Team Slides is another way to easily share your custom Storyline 360 templates. With Team Slides, you get to decide which slides you want to share—whether that’s an entire project, a single scene, or selected slides. When you upload slides to Team Slides, anyone on your team can access them right from Storyline—without having to manually import them into their library. When you share templates, you can organize them into different folders that make the most sense for you and your team. This makes it easy for everyone to browse the Team Slides library and find what they need. And the great news is, if you need to make changes to a template, you can quickly replace it with the updated slides so your files are always up-to-date and easy to manage. To learn more ways to share and manage Team Slides, check out this article: Storyline 360: Using Team Slides for Collaboration. Wrap-Up As you can see, you have two great options for sharing your custom e-learning templates so you and your coworkers can quickly access and use them in projects. Just choose which method works best for you! Interested in learning what to include in a custom template? Check out this article: How to Create a Shareable Template in Storyline 360. Want to try creating and sharing a template, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.Five Overlooked Timesavers for Working with the Timeline in Storyline 360
When I need to create richly interactive, custom learning experiences, my go-to Articulate 360 app is Storyline 360. With features like the timeline, Storyline 360 makes it simple to work with objects on my slides—making them appear and disappear in tandem with audio narration, for instance. So let’s take a look at one of the most low-key, powerful features in Storyline 360—the timeline—and five overlooked timesavers for making the most of it. Managing Objects with the Timeline When you’re building highly interactive e-learning with lots of audio and animations, it’s not unusual to end up with a number of objects on a slide. And when you’re working with so many objects, it’s also easy to get confused. Here are some timeline features and tips that can help you avoid that confusion and stay organized! Rename Objects Every object on your slide also appears on the timeline. So when you’ve got, say, 12 rectangles on your slide, Storyline 360 will number each rectangle on the timeline as Rectangle 1, Rectangle 2, etc. One of the fastest ways to confuse yourself is to leave these default labels in place. That’s because later on when you’re adding triggers to your project or building things like a drag-and-drop, you’ll waste precious time trying to figure out which of the many pictures on your slide is “Picture 27.” Save yourself a lot of trigger troubleshooting time and headaches by simply renaming objects on the timeline. To do that, just double-click on the name to the left of each object and type in a more descriptive name then hit Enter on your keyboard. It looks like this: That’s all it takes. And while it might seem a bit tedious to name every object on your slides, I guarantee it will save you loads of frustration! Undock the Timeline When you’re working with a lot of objects, scrolling through the timeline to find the ones you need can get challenging. That’s why it’s so helpful that Storyline 360 lets you undock the timeline panel and even place it on another monitor. To undock the timeline panel and place it elsewhere, just click Timeline and drag it to a new spot. I like to drag mine over to my bigger monitor so I can expand it and see everything. Ready to redock the timeline? Select Redock icon, in the upper right corner of the panel. Here's a gif showing how to undock and redock the timeline: Working with Grouped Objects on the Timeline One of my favorite timesaving tricks is to group objects on my slide so there are fewer individual items on my timeline. You can group objects by holding the CTRL key while you select the assets you want to include in the group. With all the items selected, simply right-click and choose Group. Grouping objects is especially helpful when you have a lot of assets like textboxes and shapes. I find it makes it easier to adjust timing when I can grab and place the entire grouping rather than each individual object. Expand an Object Grouping Need to make a change to an object that’s part of a group? Just click the triangle next to the group name to expand it so you can see all of the individual objects nested beneath it. Then, make your changes and click the triangle again to collapse the grouping. In short, not only does grouping assets keep your timeline looking tidy, it also makes it easier to hide/show or lock a group of objects so you can remove distractions and focus on other objects on the slide. Let’s take a look at how hiding and locking objects works. Hide and Lock Objects on the Timeline Sometimes it’s helpful to temporarily hide some objects so you can focus on others. To hide an object, click the eye icon to the left of its name on the timeline. Click the eye icon again to unhide it. There are also times when you want to see objects on your slide, but you’d rather not accidentally grab them when you’re working with other adjacent objects. To prevent one element from being moved or modified while you’re working with another, click the box before its name on the timeline. Clicking that will change it to a padlock icon. Simply click it again to unlock it. Here’s what hiding/unhiding and locking/unlocking looks like: Pro Tip: If you’ve hidden objects on the timeline, they won’t appear in your published output, so remember to unhide them before you publish! Syncing Objects on the Timeline I like to think of the timeline as a director, the objects on my slide as actors, and the slide as my stage. Thinking in these terms helps you see how the function of the timeline is to orchestrate your entire slide. By positioning and dragging the “actors” (objects) on the timeline, I can control when they’ll appear on stage (my slide) and when they’ll exit the stage in concert with other actors or my narrator. One way to orchestrate all of this activity is to use cue points. Let’s take a closer look at how cue points work. Quickly Add Cue Points To quickly add cue point markers, click Play, in the lower left corner of the timeline, then press C on your keyboard at any point where you want to insert a cue point, like this: To remove a cue point, right-click the cue point marker you want to delete and select Delete Cue Point or right-click anywhere in the timeline and select Delete All Cue Points. More Timeline Timesavers As you’ve seen, the timeline in Storyline 360 is pretty awesome. It’s hard to believe that something this simple is so powerful! In this article, I’ve covered five of my favorite overlooked timeline features, but there’s much more to learn! For more tips and tricks about using the timeline, don’t miss these articles: 3 Time-Saving Storyline Timeline Tips 11 Awesome Things You Can Do with the Storyline Timeline Storyline 360 User Guide: Working with the Timeline What’s your favorite Storyline 360 timesaver? Do you have a best tip or trick for working smarter? Share them with us in a comment, below. Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.Storyline 360: What Are Triggers?
Want to build interactivity into your e-learning course—things like jumping to a slide, clicking tabs to show different information, playing media, submitting a quiz answer, and more? With Storyline 360 you have an easy no-code solution to help you build the exact interactivity you want: triggers. Triggers tell your course what actions to perform at specific times. And what makes them so simple to work with is they’re essentially just the answers to two basic questions: What action do you want to happen? When do you want it to take place? Let’s say you want to create a Home Button that takes learners to the main menu of my course. To decide what trigger to use you need to know: What action do you want to happen: The course jumps to the main menu When do you want it to take place: When the user clicks the Home Button Or maybe you want some narration to start when a slide opens. For that, you need to know: What action do you want to happen: The narration audio file plays When do you want it to take place: When the timeline starts on the slide Once you have the answers to those two questions, you’re ready to create your trigger in Storyline 360! Now that you know how they work, let’s look at just how simple it is to set up any trigger you need for your courses. Creating a New Trigger There are two ways to get started: click Trigger in the Insert tab or select the Create New Trigger icon in the triggers panel. Either option opens the Trigger Wizard, which will guide you through the entire trigger creation process. When that Trigger Wizard pops up, you’ll probably notice that the first two sections in it feel pretty familiar. That’s because they’re essentially asking you the two questions we discussed earlier: Question 1: Action You’ve got 25 actions to choose from in Storyline 360, which means a lot of possibilities. And thankfully, they’re labeled with clear, conversational names that make it easy to browse the drop-down menu in the Trigger Wizard to find the exact action you want. Once you’ve picked your main action, additional drop-down menus appear, which allow you to further refine what you want to happen. For example: if you select Jump to Slide, the next dropdown will ask you which slide you want to go to. if you choose Play Media, the dropdown will list the media files on the slide you can pick from. Question 2: When Once you’ve identified what action should take place, then it’s time to specify when you want it to happen. Again, you’ll make your choice from a straightforward drop-down list. Just as you saw with the Action section, once you’ve picked an option from that list the Trigger Wizard will show you any additional fields you need to fill out to ensure your trigger works. This feature is a huge help for making sure important information isn’t accidentally left out. For instance, if you choose User Presses a Key, a new field will ask you to identify which key. Or, if you select Object Dropped On, you’ll then be asked to choose one of the available objects on the slide or layer. Conditions There’s also an optional section in the Trigger Wizard: Conditions. Conditions are a powerful feature for enabling actions to happen ONLY IF something else in the course has already occurred. For example, if you want your course to show a slide with remedial content only to learners who got an earlier quiz question wrong, a conditional trigger can help you do that. The possibilities and combinations are endless when it comes to conditional interactivity! Find out more about how to work with conditions in this article. Does Storyline 360 Build Any Triggers for Me Automatically? Absolutely! To save you time, some Storyline 360 slides and objects have common triggers included with them by default. Here are a few places you can expect to regularly see these automatic triggers. Previous and Next Buttons There’s no need to set up triggers for the Previous Button and Next Button every time you add a new slide. That’s taken care of for you—automatically! Quiz Slides You’ll notice quiz slides have a Submit Button by default instead of a Previous and Next Button. That button has a trigger automatically attached to it that submits the interaction when it’s clicked. Quiz Results Slides When it comes to the Graded Results slide, the prebuilt triggers do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. They check the quiz passing score and automatically show either the Failure or Success layer based on the learner’s performance. They also give learners the option to use the Review Button to revisit the quiz slides and answers. Of course, even though all the triggers listed here are prebuilt for you, you can always edit or delete them to customize your course as needed. Wrap-Up As you can see, triggers are as powerful as they are easy to use, making creating a wide variety of interactivity in Storyline 360 a snap. Looking for even more ways to work with triggers effectively? Give these articles a try: Storyline 360: Working with Triggers 4 Things You’ll Want to Know About the Triggers Panel in Storyline 360 Want to try something you learned here, but don’t have Articulate 360? Start a free 30-day trial, and come back to E-Learning Heroes regularly for more helpful advice on everything related to e-learning. If you have any questions, please share them in the comments.
