Pie chart infographic in After Effects
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Hey, in this video we're going to look at making a Pie chart infographic. So instead of having a line chart, like we did in the last one, and just having a reveal, we're going to have a Pie chart, kind of little slices popping out.
So to do it, we're going to create a 'New Composition'. And we're going to-- Background color, I'd like to change it to white, but remember, we can't do it here, we need to click 'OK', and add a new 'Layer', 'Solid'. And we are there. Make sure it's white, I'm going to call this one 'Background'. And I'm going to lock it, and he's going to sit there in the background.
So, to do a Pie chart, we're going to grab the 'Circle Tool'. Remember, have nothing selected down here otherwise the circle will just become a mask. I'm going to pick a 'Fill' color. So we might pick up any color, ours is 'Green'. Click, hold, and drag out the circle. So, we've got our circle. Back to my 'Black arrow'. Now, for this trick to work, you really need it in the center of your composition. Even if later on, you're going to move it around, to start off with, the radial white needs to have the circle in the center.
To do it, open up your align panel, so go to 'Window', go to 'Align'. It's not already open, where's 'Align'? There he is, down here. It's set to composition, so it means it's going to go center in the middle. There, in the middle. So it's perfectly in the middle, it's going to help us use this thing, called the 'Radial Wipe'. So we've got one slice here, and I'm going to rename this one, and this one's going to be called 'Base'. I'm going to close that up to make it look pretty. And then I copy and paste this one. I'm going to right click this one, and call this one 'Slice'. And this top one here, I'd like to make it a little bit bigger and change the color.
So I'm going to go into here, and what you'll notice is that-- I'm going to increase the scale of it, but watch what happens. It's going to scale from the center point. And this is a bit of a pain when you draw things. That was the center of the composition originally. Now we've moved it around. You want to use the pan behind tool just make sure that this guy is in the center. You remember the key I hold down to move the anchor point around? It's 'Command' on a Mac, and 'Control' on a PC. It's just snapped to the center. Now, when I scale it, I'm just going to grab it from the center. I'll get that up to around, maybe '120'. It's just going to be, the pie slice going to be slightly bigger than the rest of it. I'm going to twirl it down now. Here's my slice, changed the color. I'm going to click on it. Click on 'Contents', 'Ellipse'. And at the top here, black arrow.
Actually, with it selected let's pick a new color. What color? Any color. I'm going to click that one. So we've got our slices a little bit bigger, now we need to add the 'Radial Wipe'. So over here, in 'Effects & Presets', type in 'Radial'. 'Radial Wipe'. That's what you're looking for, sits in the bottom here, drag it on. And there he goes there. If he was here in the center, if I 'undo' it before I add it, and I put this guy down here, and then I add the 'Radial Wipe', it will end up with this problem. Can you see, it does it from the center of the composition not the center of my circle.
So I'm going to go 'undo', put him back, now I have the 'Radial Wipe' tool. And now, when we drag it after completion, hey, it's going to do a cool little Pie slice thing. Now we're going to play around with the timing. So, at the beginning of my time line here I'm going to let it play for a little bit. Actually, no, at the beginning here, I'd like to set the-- start the stop watch, so I can set a key frame. And I'd like to set it to be a complete '100%'. Means it's all gone. So it means that, all the way through, you can't see it. So it's '100%'. Then, maybe about 1 second into it I want to put in a 'Menu' key frame. So down here, the key frames, where are we? 'Effects', here it is there. 'Radial Wipe'. Twirl it down. There he is there, and I'm going to put in a 'Diamond', just so it don't move.
So, between here and here, it doesn't go anywhere. And maybe after half a second, it's going to expand out. And to get it to expand out-- we're going to get it to expand out how far? It's a little long, I realized that, so we're going to flip that around, that's okay. So it's going to be about—Actually, I'm going to get mine to go '80%'. You'll have to calculate what your percentage is for your bar graph, and work it back into percentages. So I'm going to do that, then what we're going to do is, because at the moment-- watch this, it's kind of cool, but it's coming down that way. So what I want to do is, start it so it's over the side here. There's this one here called 'Start Angle'. We're going to animate him, just going to move the whole thing around, till about there. So kind of comes out that side. And it's coming from the top up, sorry, the bottom up, so I want to switch that around from clockwise to counter clockwise.
I have to play around with my angle again, sits about there. So I want it to do this. And the last bit of motion, is I'm going to make this closer together. I'm going to select them all, right click them. Go to 'Velocity'. I'm going to change this to '0%' so that the easing is lovely. Cool.
The last little thing, I'm going to add my 'Motion Blur', turn it on for the 'Project', turn it on for the 'Layer'. And just toggle back to-- that's okay. So watch this. Is all of this exciting? Maybe not. Maybe it needs a little more time. It's kind of cool. I haven't actually turned my 'Motion Blur' on, which one did I turn it on for? Nothing. I avoided the whole bit.
So, that my friends is how to do a Pie chart. Now, you could duplicate this slice by copying and pasting. And what we'll do is, we'll twirl down the key frames just to see where they are. So he kind of pauses for a long time and then just pops out. So what I'd like to do is drag this along a bit, so the timing's a bit afterwards. So watch. This one starts, and then this one is going to go off a bit afterwards, so it's opened up him as well. So he starts, and then about there, that one starts. So, to make it look different, there's couple of things we need to do. With it selected, with the black arrow, I can pick a different color, and what I'll do is, I'll get him to rotate around.
Now I've got to make sure that I'm actually on a key frame there. Watch this, if I start to play around with how long it's been acting for, it's going to-- add a new key frame, so what I want to do is, hold down my 'Shift' and I want to get to here. So how far is it going to pop out? This one here is only going to pop out a little bit. So I'm going to go pop out '93%', which is cool. And, I want to start with the 'Start Angle'. So I don't want it to start there. I want it to start where that one finishes about there. Nice. So, it's going to go. And you can do a few different ones, kind of more popping up by duplicating it.
All right, that is how to make a Pie chart infographic. Let's hit 'Save'. I'll see you in the next video.