If you've spent time working with the Microsoft Office Suite, you can appreciate how Microsoft provides free images that can be added to a slide with just a few clicks of the mouse. What kind of assets have historically been included with Captivate? Beyond some canned animations, not much. I've always felt that the lack of free quality images was a major shortcoming within Captivate.
With the newest release of Captivate, Adobe has addressed that shortcoming. If you visit the Insert menu in Adobe Captivate 6, you'll find a new Characters menu item.
After selecting Characters from the Insert menu, the Characters dialog box will open. There are multiple Categories, each containing multiple posed models that you are free to use in your projects. According to Adobe, the Characters will be updated from time to time, so you will likely gain access to even more Characters over time.
Pick a Category, select a pose, click the OK button, and the selected image will appear on your slide. Anyone who has spent hours trying to find cohesive images of people for use in an eLearning project is going to be really excited about this new feature, especially since the background has already been removed from each of the Characters. The inserted Characters can be resized just like any other image. And just like that, you've got yourself an eLearning guide for your lesson.
Note: If you don't have many characters, visit the Adobe Captivate trial download page and download the eLearning Assets. Once the assets are installed, you will find that several posed characters have been added to Captivate.
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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online Captivate 5 classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced). Our Captivate 6 classes will ramp up in August.
How different do you see this from say Storyline's Characters, Lectora's or Claro's (dominKnow) people browser? - pros and cons/variances?
Posted by: Paul Schneider | July 02, 2012 at 05:01 PM
This looks interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Posted by: Sam @ webtemplates.com.au | July 12, 2012 at 11:36 PM
Hey Kevin,
Glad you like our images in Captivate 6. We've been making lots of templates for Captivate lately: http://elearningtemplates.com/adobe-captivate-templates/
Posted by: Andrew | July 18, 2012 at 07:10 PM
Helpful, thank you - but I've purchased Captivate 6 and cannot seem to find where I can add more characters. You wrote: "Note: If you don't have many characters, visit the Adobe Captivate trial download page and download the eLearning Assets. Once the assets are installed, you will find that several posed characters have been added to Captivate." I can't find any eLearning Assets to download from the link you've given. Thoughts?
Posted by: Amy Spence | September 22, 2012 at 11:23 PM
Never mind, found it :-)
Posted by: Amy Spence | September 22, 2012 at 11:25 PM
Glad you were able to find them - I cannot! :) Looking all over the linked page and I'm unable to find the eLearning Assets.
Please post a set of clicky steps; thank you.
Posted by: Julia Berger | December 14, 2012 at 02:47 PM