Easy as Pie Charts - Adobe After Effects tutorial

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This tutorial is as easy as pie... pie charts that is! It's all about making a simple and easilly editable pie chart. The trick is to get one wedge to start where the other wedge ends. It's very clever and quite tasty. Also if you look closely you'll learn things about pies, and me, and yourself.

This is the perfect solution for when you need a pie chart but someone isn't giving you the data you need right away. Or if a producer comes in and changes it. Or needs to change the order, or whatever. This is brilliant, trust me. I think so and I'm the guy who made it.

If you want to suggest a tutorial topic please do so here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13A2e...

If you have any questions just let me know in the comments.

If you want to download this project file go here: http://gum.co/cXbV

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Closed Caption:

hey everybody I'm Evan Abrams and today
we're going to learn how to make pie
charts in after effects
just when I you're inside of them so pie
charts are great for showing things like
what percentage of people enjoy what
kind of pie or what percentage of people
enjoy putting cheddar cheese on their
pie
that's pretty gross but you know enjoy
doing whatever you do with that but I'm
just here to show you how to make charts
so i'm going to close up the oven and
you know it for 350 and bake us up to my
charts so fire after effects and let's
get to it
so in After Effects make a new
composition and it doesn't really matter
the size or anything just make a new one
we're going to make the pie shapes first
so those are just made out of circles
so go to your lips tool double click
there and make some circles and pick our
first color
that's good enough color and now going
to the ellipse and flips path and
uncheck the linkage between the two
sighs properties and them down to like a
750 should do and you can link them if
you want but that doesn't matter
and we will rename this wedge 1
now we're gonna make five wedges in
total and each one will be controlled by
a separate thing on a control layer so
let's make that layer so we make a new
null object call that object control and
on the control
we want to put in a slider control and
this slider control will control side
control enough times but this will
determine how far along the completion
of the pie wages from say 02 upwards of
a hundred so you type in 25 for now
so when that's a 25 we want this wheel
here to be twenty-five percent complete
or twenty-five percent blue
so go back to your wedge
and we're going to give it the radial
wipe and make sure you use the transform
radio white but not the animation preset
so just drag that on there and the
transition completeness you can see goes
from zero percent up to a hundred which
is kind of the reverse of what we want
so what we would like is to link this to
the slider control and we'd like it also
to go counterclockwise or i would if
you'd rather go the other way to
whatever it's not important to this
lesson
alt click on that and i'll bring up this
expression and we would like to link
this to the control layer so I'm just
going to lock the effects control their
go down here to our center line and then
pick with that to this so we're saying
transition completeness you are now
whatever slider control is but that's
not totally what we want we want it to
be 100
- whatever that is meaning it will be
hundred minus the value here in this
case 25 leaving 75% there
so hundred less 25 to 75 and that shows
twenty-five percent of the circle as
being on
perfect you're doing quite well so far
so now the other thing is that we want
the wedges when they come on each wedge
to start where the other wedge stops so
that means that we want basically the
start angle of every other wedge to
reference not only the transition
completeness but also the start angle of
this wedge
so if this one moves it start . then
sort of the others so go to which one
duplicated and we've created wedge two
and four wedge to set its color
there is a red it's a good read and then
we're going to go into the effects going
to its radio wipe and we're going to be
altering its start angle so will be
typing in an expression here and
referencing things in wedge one solo
just full screen this for a minute just
so we can look at what we're doing here
and I do that by hitting the console
button it's Wiggly under the Escape key
now what we're going to be doing here is
in this expression for the start angle
we're going to be referencing the
completeness here and the start angle so
let me just put in some variables long
ago p equals and p4 percentage maybe
that's an important
p equals pic with the down to the half
good and then hit a semicolon to end
that we're going 2a equals and then pick
with down to the start angle here
good and semicolon there now we're going
to use these two variables to make
something and we're going to say 360
because it's 360 degrees and then we
will multiply that by and remember your
bed mass from math class in brackets
we're going to put P so whatever
percentage of the completion it was
divided by negative hundred which is
going to make its a point seven five and
then
- that's what's going to be minus point
seven-five and it's gonna be 360 times
negative . 75 will yield the start angle
which will be the angle where this is
and trust me math and then we're going
to also add whatever a is so then offset
it by
however much a is hit return and then we
look back at what we've got and so far
so good
so since both of these things reference
the same slider we can see that as we
grow and shrink this then
that changes but we need one for each of
these so go to slider control and
duplicated slider control -
we know that for which to we wanted to
look at slider - so I'm just going to
hit the you button to bring up all the
things we've changed on this layer so
far
so we've got this thing here that's
saying reference the control layer and
just change slider control their to
slider control space to or whatever you
called that
that's good and now we can change both
of these independently
now let's go ahead and also make these
reference not the name of the layer but
layer as relative to wedge - so what I
mean by that is instead of referencing
something called which one would tell to
reference index plus 1 and what that
does is it means instead of looking at a
layer that has a name
just look at the reference number I'm
reference layer to but I'd like to look
at reference layer 3 so 2 plus one
equals three and that's index of 2 plus
one equals three and that will put you
at referencing this layer so do the same
for the other wedge one reference and
that is index plus 1 hit enter or star
return and then you're all good
nothing's changed so when you duplicate
wedge - it's going to create another
wedge that has the same properties as
which to accept which three is no
referencing wedge to in the same way
wedge to reference wedge 1 because of
that index plus one thing
now it's also change its color too
like a yellow or something good and then
we'll just make another slider control
duplicate that make sure that this is
now pointing slider controls three and
then give this a value like that
and now we're going to come or so
duplicate it change its color to be like
green good make sure that it is looking
for something that we're going to call
slider control for think you're getting
the hang of it now rise and duplicate
this again and duplicate this again
slider control five slider control five
and give it a new color
I don't really know I guess like a
purple may be good and that is super
fantastic
so now we want to do is make sure all of
these sort of had up 200 so let's say
this one is like 35 maybe this one here
could be like 20 and then 3 5 2015 10
there we go so this kind of rounds out
the complete graph and now we have to
animate it one of the reasons that we
used all of these sliders on the same
control layer is because we've put it
was just in here so if you want to
quickly call up keyframes gonna be
calling up a whole lot of other nonsense
that you don't necessarily want so we go
into the control layer here and we set
keyframes on all of those hit you and
then you can bring them all up and just
take those try to go forward a bit in
time and then set all their starting
value zero and as you can see they come
on in this nice kind of rainbowy thing
right so maybe we only want to take
about 20 frames to bring this stuff on
so pull that ahead take these keyframes
we're going - easy easy them
we're gonna go into there and just pull
that like so so they have an interesting
shape to the motion and then that comes
on like that and then an important step
is to stagger the motion so we know
slider controls the first one bring it
on then two and then three and four and
i'm sure you'll do a better job at a
staggering these in a uniform way but
boo
there you go so they kind of animate on
in that kind of a way now
I think you've pretty much done it so
that's all you need to do but there's
one more thing that I'm going to warn
you about if you want to move this
and when I say if you want to move this
i mean if you want to put it anywhere
but the center of the screen
do not click and drag it because as you
can see weird things start to happen
that's because the radio wipe always
references the center of the image or
the center of wherever that thing is
hanging out so you can see here in the
effects the radial wipe has a wife
center which you can move but you don't
really want to
now we could have just parented this to
the position of the layer and you're
totally fine to do that but usually what
I do is I just pre compose all of it and
then move it around and then you can do
things like you can go layer you can go
layer styles you can add like a drop
shadow to this if you so desire
it's kind of beef that up a little bit
to kind of like that
so you gotta drop shadow you could on
each of these to go layer layer styles
had a stroke at a stroke to all of those
make sure that the stroke is actually
something cool maybe thinking it up a
little bit make sure it's on the center
that would be really helpful
something like that maybe change the
color pure white so last year and then
there we go
so hey that looks pretty good and
actually pretty stupid but nonetheless
you've got a pie chart you can move it
around you have all the tools you need
to animate it and interesting ways
play around with that have fun and
hopefully this didn't take up to bigger
percentage of your day and if it did
want to make me a pie graph about it so
I'm having neighbors if you enjoy this
pie graph e tutorial you can use it for
other things that aren't pie graphs if
you really want but hopefully it's
helpful if you have any questions put
them in the comments if you have trouble
with the tutorial just let me know if
you're interested in After Effects check
out the facebook page follow me on
twitter @pcc a bruise and subscribe to
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thank you so much for watching comment
rate subscribe or whatever or don't it's
totally up to you and I'll see you next
week or somewhere around the internet
thanks and have a nice date