Animating bars & numbers?

[Hanayou]

Hi there,

I've had a quick search around the forum, but as this isn't really about one specific area of using AE I figured I'd seek advice by covering everything I want to do in a separate post. What I'm trying to make is a leveling chart that is data driven. This is best described by a mock-up image of what I'm planning:

http://i.imgur.com/909dVdp.jpg

I want to track how much work I'm doing on different things both in hours, but also associate that with what is almost a game-like leveling system. So essentially I'll define how much XP an hour of work is (thinking around 500 for now as an example), then make a big list from level 1-100 that has total XP values. On the image above the anchor point is on the far left of the green bars, so my plan was to scale them depending on how close they are in % to the next level (where of course the difference gets bigger between each level so the animation would have to be done through a mathematical expression). The animation is at 30fps and I was hoping I could get from stationary->accelerated bar movement->decelerating bar movement->stationary at new numbers with a fixed time of 6 seconds. The bar would have to reset when it hits 100% and increase the level number and having fluid increase in hours as the bar moves (and even maybe XP below that) is something I'd really like to do.

This sort of animation will of course have to be data driven and I was curious both how to do that as well as how people would recommend doing that. I've dabbed in bits of C++ (enough to be able to certainly understand how this would work logically) so using JS for AE should be easy enough to learn. Can I write this in anything? Does AE have a built in tool for it? Also, as this is something I will keep coming back to, I guess it has to be more than just an expression and data set. I assume I'd need to have tabs on starting and finishing values and make sure that at the end of each animation the end data got saved to the starting values.

There's quite a lot going on in this so I'm getting slightly bogged down in how to make it. Any suggestions would be appreciated,

Thanks

[Warren Heaton · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, there's no Graph Tool like Illustrator in After Effects.

It would be Expression driven and AE Expressions are based on the standard JavaScript language, so you might be able to code it on your own.

More on Expressions here:

     Expression Basics

     Learn expression basics to link animations in Adobe After Effects

You might find Infographic Toolkit helpful:

     Infographics Toolkit - aescripts + aeplugins - aescripts.com

You might also be able to find something helpful in Rich Young's ProVideo Coalition article:

     Charts and graphics in After Effects

     https://www.provideocoalition.com/charts-and-graphs-in-after-effects/

-Warren

[Mylenium]

Unfortunately, there's no Graph Tool like Illustrator in After Effects.

Barely any loss, considering how garbage AI's graph tool is. Even the simplest Excel graph will beat it flat hand. That said, the only way to do any such stuff in AE is create a ton of scripts and template projects rigged with expressions. I'm just not sure why anyone would want to, given that it is supposed to serve an entirely different purpose. You could just as well code something in Mathlab/ Mathematica and be done with it.

Mylenium

[Warren Heaton]

Mylenium  wrote

Barely any loss, considering how garbage AI's graph tool is.

And hopefully it doesn't get better any time soon!  I'd hate to lose the billable hours making data look visually appealing.