Charts and graphs

Michele Yamazaki has a nice update on methods of making charts and graphs in AE. Since Digital Anarchy Data Animator hasn’t been updated for AE CS3, she recommends these tutorials:

• 3D bar chart without Plugins - Harry Frank
• Fake Stock Chart - Harry Frank
• Pie Chart tutorial for Boris FX plugins
• Alan Shisko tutorial on pie charts
• Animating pie charts with expressions - Harry again.

Here's a post from last year, 'Battling business graphics', that has complementary details:

Battling for mindshare for animating business graphics in AE are Digital Anarchy's Data Animator filter set and Zakwerks gun Alan Shisko, who explains how to convert animating vertical bars to a pie chart with Polar Coordinates (Rect to Polar) and enhance it in 3D with Zaxwerks filters.

Harry Franks shows you another way with Radial Wipe in Expression Based Pie Charts (thumbnail above). Dan Ebberts and Mylenium (line charts) have posted similar ideas with expressions or XML (as in Flash and AE8). And there's a 3D Chart function in Boris RED, and yet another filter for AE & NLEs, StageTools MovingChart. Finally, Dean Velez has a free chart lesson on growing pillars.

Also, Fusion Charts at Google makes animated Flash charts for free (sorta useful), and Digital Inspiration mentions a few others too.

Update: John Still on the AE-List noted, "didn't see it listed but there's also a preset in the Profound Effects Gak Pak plug-in with lots of controls to create pie chart graphic."