Triggering object animation in Adobe Captivate
I have encountered situations in which there is a request to show a couple of elements with an entrance animation when the corresponding button was clicked.
Certainly, it is not a difficult task to accomplish, if you are programming your eLearning module using Articulate Storyline, that is, since you have at your disposition slide layers that have an independent timeline (from the base layer), where you can have a multitude of elements, animations and interactions, and the best part is that they are only triggered when the layer is visible.
But how can you accomplish a similar effect in Adobe Captivate, when you only have a shared timeline for all the objects on the slide?
The first option would be to create some sort of slidelet that, interestingly enough, has a separate timeline that is independent from the main timeline. Unfortunately, this type of object (slidelet) is only available as a part of an interaction (Rollover Slidelet) and can’t be programmed as a stand-alone element.
However, there is another way you can trigger animations (In Captivate they are called effects) from the actions panel of the interactive object.
The option you are looking for, is called “Apply Effect”, and that will give you several effect options, from Entrance effects, to Emphasis and Exit effects:
Here, you can see that the basic order to show the objects entering with a specific effect, you have to:
1. Hide the element by default
2. Show the object on click
3. Immediately after, apply desired effect
Hopefully with this simple trick, you can add a bit more dynamism to your eLearning courses programmed in Adobe Captivate.
