After Effects CC tricky infographic: semi-circle with dots to illustrate parliamentary election

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
December 23, 2019
1 reply
2128 views

I have to create an animated infographic showing the numerical results of a parliamentary election.

I'm at a loss as to the most efficient way to do this in After Effects CC. Using the graph below as my model, I need to make a semi-circle with 491 colored dots showing the alloted party seats. Is there a more practical way to do this than having to manually create these 491 dots? I'm thinking that I should be using the Elipse tool to create the semi-circle? But is there some kind of plugin that would allow me to batch create these dots or divide the semi circle into dots? Thank you bery much in advance for any help with this.

Expressions

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Correct answer Mylenium

The division is uneven so there cannot be any automated tool or effect. This is a classical example where one would elaborately rig everything with expressions and link them to some sliders and then have the code do the work. A simple workaround might be to use text layers on mask paths with dot dingbats and control the coloration with text selectors and animators, but even that will require quite a bit of tweaking. No easy one-stop answers here.

Mylenium

MyleniumCorrect answer

Legend

The division is uneven so there cannot be any automated tool or effect. This is a classical example where one would elaborately rig everything with expressions and link them to some sliders and then have the code do the work. A simple workaround might be to use text layers on mask paths with dot dingbats and control the coloration with text selectors and animators, but even that will require quite a bit of tweaking. No easy one-stop answers here.

Mylenium

R

Rick Gerard

Community Expert

I think I would approach this by using a dot pattern created using a few copies of the repeater animator as a track matte for another shape layer that was just simple shapes drawn with the pen tool and filled with different colors. This took me about 3 minutes:

A simple expression dividing 180 by the number of copies plus1 and another that tied the Transform>Ellipse>Position to the repeater anchor point made creating the dots easy and the shapes for the colors, as you can see from the outlines are not complicated at all.

L

lucasmariano

Participant

Hey @Rick Gerard ! Your solution it's really interesting.
I'm terrible with expressions, can you be more clear about how you used expression on it?

I need to create this same chart but I'm lost.

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