Animate 'growing' staircase...?

[sam_amara]

Hi all 🙂

I'm wondering if you can help. I'm trying to create an animation where a set of stairs sort of grows up and over, up and over, from the bottom left of the stage to the top right. The idea is to reveal images on each 'step'. The images will be revealed via timeline adjustments, but I can't figure how to make the steps 'grow' or even if I can. I made a series of straight lines (vertical, horizontal, vertical, horizontal, and so on) to create the staircase, and I thought I could apply effects of fly in from bottom, fly in from left and so on, but I can't seem to make the starting point of the next line match up with the end point of the line before it. Does that make sense? I've played with the arrows and tried to match up the coordinates thinking that might be it, but it doesn't seem to help. 

At this point I'm about to give up and just start with a complete, static staircase and reveal images as planned, but I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas of how I can make this work. Any help would be appreciated 🙂

Thanks!

[RodWard]

Your second plan would be easier.  If you truly want that more sophisticated level of animation though, Captivate won't do it for you.  You should look into using Adobe Animate, published out as an OAM file and then imported into Captivate as an animation.  With Adobe Animate, almost anything is possible for 2D animation.

[sam_amara]

Hi Rod - thank you for your reply and your help. I'm disappointed that there isn't a solution but happy that I couldn't figure out something that isn't there in the first place! I'll look into doing it with Animate later; I just want to get this done now but will definitely try Animate later as I'd like to have those more sophisticated animations. 

Thanks again!

[RodWard]

The problem that you are running into with trying to get the startint point of a Captivate motion effect lining up perfectly with the end point of a previous effect is because Adobe decided to make Captivate's animations work in a different way to Adobe Animate's animations.  

In Adobe Animate everything is set to move to precise X and Y pixel coordinates.  That made it possible to perfectly control almost all aspects of animation.  With Captivate tha movements are 'relative' rather than 'absolute'.  The effect animation starts FROM the actual location of the timeline object and then moves it relative to that starting position.  But in realisty what you are seeing is an 'effect' that looks like an animation rather than a true animation because once the timeline of the effect is passed the object being 'animated' snaps back to its starting appearance.

Captivate's timeline effects are a simple and easy way to add some animation. Anyone can quickly make something move on a slide this way.  But it was never intended to be used for the kind of sophisticated animation you are wanting to create.