Multiple portraits in articy draft
Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2018 2:57 am
EDIT: It seems naming the string field's technical name "Display_Name" seems to achieve the effect we were seeking, fulfilling the first solution we propose below. Happened upon this by pure chance and trial and error! 
I'd recommend adding this fact to the articy converter documentation.
ORIGINAL TEXT:
Hello again!
We're attempting to specify multiple character portraits to display different emotions from articy draft. As far as I can tell, there is no way to specify multiple portraits from within articy directly, though you can add them after the fact in Dialogue System. The issue here is, our workflow demands the ability to overwrite our dialogue system data frequently, thus we must check the "overwrite" box on the converter which will remove any actor portraits we add after the fact.
We discovered a decent workaround for this using multiple entities in articy, each with a unique portrait to display different emotions. First, we tried creating two entities named simply "Ian" with different portraits and imported them both as actors, but the second Ian would not display in the conversation at runtime. Therefore, we discovered that if we could set the Display Name from within articy, we could then just name the entities "IanAnnoyed", "IanConfused" etc etc. while being able to show just "Ian" for the actor name UI element.
The solutions we thought up:
1. Allow the use of a string field in articy to define the Display Name in Dialogue System. This ALMOST works as the Display Name's field is literally "Display Name", and if you could set a string's technical name in articy to "Display Name" then it would just magically work... but alas, articy's technical names can't contain spaces.
2. Allow the use of a strip which contains portrait images, which convert into multiple portrait images in Dialogue System.
However we've considered there's another solution that may exist that we're not aware of. Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks a bunch!
I'd recommend adding this fact to the articy converter documentation.
ORIGINAL TEXT:
Hello again!
We're attempting to specify multiple character portraits to display different emotions from articy draft. As far as I can tell, there is no way to specify multiple portraits from within articy directly, though you can add them after the fact in Dialogue System. The issue here is, our workflow demands the ability to overwrite our dialogue system data frequently, thus we must check the "overwrite" box on the converter which will remove any actor portraits we add after the fact.
We discovered a decent workaround for this using multiple entities in articy, each with a unique portrait to display different emotions. First, we tried creating two entities named simply "Ian" with different portraits and imported them both as actors, but the second Ian would not display in the conversation at runtime. Therefore, we discovered that if we could set the Display Name from within articy, we could then just name the entities "IanAnnoyed", "IanConfused" etc etc. while being able to show just "Ian" for the actor name UI element.
The solutions we thought up:
1. Allow the use of a string field in articy to define the Display Name in Dialogue System. This ALMOST works as the Display Name's field is literally "Display Name", and if you could set a string's technical name in articy to "Display Name" then it would just magically work... but alas, articy's technical names can't contain spaces.
2. Allow the use of a strip which contains portrait images, which convert into multiple portrait images in Dialogue System.
However we've considered there's another solution that may exist that we're not aware of. Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks a bunch!