[Brian Holzknecht]

Hey Dustin,

Not exactly sure what your question is, but I’ve made a basic bar graph rig using expressions. I’m not very good with math or programming, so it may not be as efficient as it could be, but I’ll share it with you, and maybe it can help you build your own. In my project there are a few layers that control everything. On the layer named “Layout controls” #36 there is a slider control effect that controls the number of bars. If you change that from 7 to 4, for example it will only show the first 4 bars while hiding the other 6 in the comp. you can resize and reposition the whole chart area using the 2 nulls at the top “BL” & “TR”. All animations are controlled via the “Animation Controls” layer. Check out all the control layers at bottom and you’ll see there are a lot of options you have control of. Hopefully it all helps.

I tried to upload the project to Creative cow, but kept getting errors, so hopefully my link to my dropbox will work.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/g1yzlsg5kryxt3h/basic%20graph.aep?dl=0

Brian

[Brian Holzknecht]

Thanks Jakob,

That worked perfectly and much simpler than I thought it would be. Much appreciated.

Brian

[Brian Holzknecht]

Although this isn’t related to expressions and should probably be posted in the generic after effects section, here is something that will hopefully help.
In my opinion the key to making this work is using a font that is suitable, then adding a levels adjustment and adjust the alpha channel in the levels effect to remove all unwanted anti aliasing. I am using a font from dafont called blocks to make my example work.

Hope that helps,

Brian

[Brian Holzknecht]

Hey Mervin,

I apologize, I don’t know why I think I saw something that you were new to AE, regardless, hopefully that’ll fix your issue.

Brian

[Brian Holzknecht]

Hey Mervin,

So I think I saw in some previous posts that you were kind of new to after effects, (about 4 months or so), so I’ll do my best to help you out with this. First off, if you just want to change text color like you are doing, there are a few ways to do it. With that said, to change between two colors you don’t need 2 fill effects, you can just animate the actual color parameter of a single fill effect, but obviously when you do that you need to be on the keyframe to change the colors or you’ll add keyframes in between. If you want to use an expression I would have 3 controls in your Control Layer, 2 color controls like you have and a slider control named “ColorTrans”. Place the below expression onto a single fill effect on your text layer and then you can animate the slider control to transition between the colors.

Hope that helps,

Brian

c1 = thisComp.layer("Control").effect("Color Control")("Color");
c2 = thisComp.layer("Control").effect("Color Control 2")("Color");
trans = thisComp.layer("Control").effect("ColorTrans")("Slider");

linear(trans, 0, 100, c1, c2)

[Brian Holzknecht]

Also all the expressions in my project may be terrible because I don’t fully understand what I’m doing all the time, but they do seem to get the job done.

Thanks,

Brian

[Brian Holzknecht]

I’m not 100% sure how to share projects but here it is, I hope. I work on this project a little more each year, because I pretty much don’t do any more after effects animations, but I have one client that still wants to use me once a year on a big project with a lot of bar graphs and charts, so I figured I might as well have some fun with it and try to automate a lot of it.

13053_basicbargraph2019.aep.zip

Thanks

Brian

[Brian Holzknecht]

Your expression skills are so impressive, the help I tried to provide came from one of your posts to someone else… Clearly I need to learn a ton more on expressions.

Brian

[Brian Holzknecht]

Hmm… that’s weird. What version of after effects are you using? I’m using 2018 and In my test I made a 2nd comp that I’m using as a source with the time remap on.

I’m not really an expression guy, but i figured I’d try to help while I’m waiting for some assistance on my question. Lol.

I’m not at my computer or I’d try to troubleshoot it right now. Sorry.

Brian

[Brian Holzknecht]

Here is something I modified from a previous post I found and it seems to do the trick. Not sure if it’s correct, but it appeared to work for me.

Brian

skip = framesToTime(1); // frame skip
m = thisComp.marker;
begin = 0;

if (m.numKeys > 0){
n = m.nearestKey(time).index;
if (time < m.key(n).time) n--;
begin = n*skip;
}
value + begin