Assembling the materials

To begin assembling the project, first record the dialog from your storyboards, using Vcommunicator Studio's built in recording capabilities:

1. Right-click the Voice track in the Tracks section, and then click Insert.

2. In the Insert dialog box, click the microphone button (see Figure 3).

   

   Figure 3. Using the Insert dialog box to activate the microphone.

3. Type the file name for the particular clip you are recording in the blank field (see Figure 4).

4. In the Voice Recorder dialog box, click Record and record your audio. When you are finished, click Record again to stop the recording.

   

   Figure 4. Using the Voice Recorder to record an audio clip.

5. Click Play to test your audio.
6. Click OK to return to the Insert dialog box.
7. In the Transcript field, type the transcript of the audio (see Figure 5).

8. Click Preview, and then click OK.

   

   Figure 5. Using the Insert dialog box to preview your audio clip.

Once you are satisfied with the speech animations, you can add additional gestures, facial expressions, and body positions to inject more realism into the mentor and customer avatars by connecting their actions and emotions to their words.

After you process your audio, Studio inserts a generic starting gesture for you. To add more gestures:

1. Drag the end bar on the Gesture track to the left, so there is room to add gestures over the Voice track (see Figure 6).

   

   

   Figure 6. Using Vcommunicator Studio to add gestures.

2. Right-click the Gesture track.
3. Choose Insert from the pop-up menu to open the Gesture dialog box.

4. Expand the Category tree by clicking the plus signs next to each category (see Figure 7).

   

   Figure 7. Vcommunicator® Studio saves time and effort by not having to create complex behaviors from scratch, thanks to the large library of physical behaviors it includes.

5. Select the category of the gesture you want to insert (Full Body, Upper Body, Lower Body, and so on).
6. In the Gestures field, double-click the gesture you want to insert.
7. Notice that the gesture has been added to the Selected Gestures list to the left. This list can contain multiple gestures.

Tip: The Selected Gestures list can be used to combine multiple gestures. For instance, if you place a full-body gesture at the top and a right-arm gesture at the bottom, the character will use the gesture at the bottom for the right arm, and the gesture at the top for everything but the right arm. If you switch the positions of those two gestures, the right-arm-only gesture would be ignored, because the full-body one already has a right-arm component, and the gesture at the bottom always takes priority.

Note: The iconic red X at the bottom of each gesture represents the limbs of the body that are involved in the gesture. For example, if only the arms are involved in the gesture, then the two bottom arcs of the X would not be highlighted in red.

 

Gestures that involve the entire body have the entire X highlighted .

After the individual segments are animated, the videos need to be exported to the AVI format so that they can be converted for use with Adobe Flash and Adobe Captivate (see Figure 8).

To export the clip to AVI format:

1. From the File menu, select File Export > Movie.

2. In the Video Capture Settings dialog box (see Figure 8), click Browse.

   

   Figure 8. Using the Video Capture Settings dialog box to export the clip to an AVI file.

   Browse to where you want to save the AVI file. Type the name of the file and click Save.

3. Choose your video and audio compression rates or accept the defaults, and then click OK.

Tip: If you are importing your animation into Adobe Flash, you may want to use the Alpha channel so that your character can appear over-top of your Flash movie or, in this case, over the master background image of the user interface.

To use the Alpha Channel, check the Enable Alpha Channel option in the Video Capture Settings dialog box before exporting your movie, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. Enabling the Alpha Channel option.

Once the videos are exported from Vcommunicator® Studio:

• Convert them to FLV videos using the Flash Video Encoder by opening Flash Professional and selecting File > Import > Import Video…. The wizard then provides on-screen instructions to convert the files.
• Use the On2 VP6 codec and the Low quality setting to keep file sizes at a minimum acceptable level.

Note: At this point in the process, additional ideas and expressions for the characters may require some reanimation. As many developers will attest, revisions at this stage are not ideal and are time-consuming. However, with Vcommunicator® Studio, this laborious process becomes a simple matter of revising the animations and re-exporting to video.

With the videos complete, the focus turns to designing the user interface. I split the interface into two main regions: the top banner and the work area. For the top banner, a graphic has been created at 790 x 545 pixels to allow it to fit on an 800 x 600 screen inside a browser window. The work area is then divided into quadrants, so that the different elements of the simulation can all be visible at once.

Tip: To avoid creating conflicts with specific instructional design principles like redundancy, developers should focus on allowing users to determine, at the outset, if they would like captions of all sound files. It's usually easiest to finish the captioned version first so that any revisions don't have to be made in two versions simultaneously.

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