After Effects Tutorial - Progress Bars

progress bars from indicating downloading files to how much XP you need before you level up in your latest RPG it's inevitable that you've experienced your next progress bar without even noticing I mean you're experiencing one right now by watching this video that made you look so with how often they're in our lives let's progress forward and learn how to make one in Adobe After Effects [Music] so we're here in Adobe After Effects and we've got a brand new composition and we're going to start by creating a new solid so we'll click on the composition we'll go layer new solid like so and we'll call this our progress bar it's the size of a comp we've just picked a random color and we'll go okay next what we want to do is pre-compose this so we're gonna right click the layer in our timeline and hit precompose and we're gonna call this progress bar graphic hit OK and then we'll double click on that layer in order to go into that pre composition now selecting the solid that we created a moment before we'll go to effect noise and grain and fractal noise for the fractal type will go to dynamic progressive and we'll bump a contrast up to say 150 if we change the blending mode to overlay we get a bit more of a cool so our orange-yellow sort of look going on and what we want to do is we want to add a bit of movement to this so for the evolution you see here on the stopwatch we're going to hold alt and click then down below in our expression window we're going to type time times by 100 we'll hit enter on that if we drag the playhead along you can see we've got this awesome sort of bubbling look going on but we also want to add some lateral movement to give it a feel that it's actually progressing so we'll go back to our effects controls go to offset turbulence and again we're going to hold alt and click on the stopwatch now if we give ourselves a bit of space where we can see this expression window we're going to type square bracket time times by 20 comma 0 end square bracket and what that's going to do is that's going to make it move to the right as we drag forward in time it's not going to move up and down that's why we've got 0 there it doesn't really matter having that a accurate number because it's just an effect being applied so now we've got our progress bar graphic doing its cool thing we can go back to our other composition so back in our main composition if we drag the playhead you can see that animating like so now we want to draw the ball that'll go around our actual progress bar and in order to do this we're gonna click off and then we're going to click on the rectangle tool and we're gonna click in the very middle of the screen if you don't see these targets you can go here and hit title action safe and that'll bring up those guides like so so we'll click in the middle and then holding ctrl will just drag out where we want our progress bar to be so we'll go for something like that now we'll go down to the bottom left and actually open up our rectangle and we want to switch to fill off so we only have the stroke and I'm gonna go up to the top and change the stroke to white so we got a bit of contrast going on we can label this as our progress bar border and now we're going to create the actual mask for our progress bar graphic so if we hit layer new solid we're going to create another layer and we'll call this progress bar mask drag it down between the layers so it's right above our graphics and then using the track map option here for our graphic we're going to select alpha matte if you don't see these options and instead you see the other ones you can always click toggle switch modes underneath or the hockey is f4 so now you'll see it's hidden our progress bar mask layer and it's actually showing that it has a alpha mask here so now we can drag our actual layer back and you can see where it goes like that so we can bring it in bring it out but you'll notice also that we're not kind of fitting within this border so if we select our progress bar graphic we'll go up to the rectangle tool and again clicking in the middle and holding ctrl now we're going to draw an actual mask out so you'll see we draw a mask and we'll eyeball it to kind of fit into that space we can turn off our title and action safe so we can see it a bit clearer and now if we select that mask we can move it back and forward and you can see it kind of moves back and forward now to make sure everything stays together we're going to create a new null object and we're going to call this our progress bar controller we'll select the other three layers and actually pick whip the parent to it so they're all together and now we've got a bit more control we can drag that around we can scale with the null object or rotate if we want to and we've got a lot more control over where it is the other thing we'll do is create a text layer so we'll click the T tool for text and then click roughly in the middle and for now we'll type to 0% well hit OK and we'll drag it just so it positions itself nicely above we'll also go down to our timeline window and for that layer actually parent it to the controller as well so let's start rigging up our progress bar if we select the null controller we can go to effect expression controls and slider control and we'll name this progress we'll go above in the effects controls and just lock it so we can easily reference it and then going down to our text we're going to click the little arrows until we get source text holding alt we'll holding alt will click and that will give us our expression window and we're going to type math round parenthesis and then pick with our progress slider like so in parentheses and then we're going to type plus quotation marks percentage sign quotation marks we'll hit enter on that and now we'll see if we dragged up progress you can see it goes up and down the next thing we'll do is we'll go down to our progress bar mask we'll hit P and we'll right click and hit separate dimensions and we're going to actually set up an expression on our exposition we need to know where they start and the end is so we'll look for the end and you'll see it's at 1 minus 198 and then we'll go all the way back to the start and you'll see it's at - 177 - if we hold alt and click on the exposition we can now type our expression we're going to start with a linear expression for this if you want to know more about the linear expression there's a new video out that covers everything to do with the linear expression the link is in the description below but for now we'll type linear parentheses going to pick whip our progress slider and then comma 0 - comma 100 because we're going from 0% to 100% and then we're starting out - 1 seven to two and we're going up to minus one nine eight we'll hit enter and then you can see if we drag our progress slider it goes up and down like so you'll notice though that when we've got our progress bar behind our text it's a bit hard to read so what we can do is have a different color text appear when it's actually being overlaid like so so we'll put our progress slider back to zero we'll select our text layer and press ctrl D to duplicate and this text layer we're going to change the color of to black you see we're getting this weird coloring and obviously it doesn't work on black so we need to use the progress bar mask again so we'll select our progress bar mask hit control D to duplicate we're going to slide it in between the layers and then for this layer which is white we're going to actually select our fur inverted matte so like that and then we'll select the progress bar mask again and hit control D drag it above our other text layer and then we'll hit track matte and then alpha matte like so now if we drag our progress slider back and forward you can see it masks out one text layer and masks in the other text layer so we get that visual of that progress bar and it's nicely contrast against both our yellow and both our white now we can go and we can keyframe this progress slider so if we start at zero seconds we've keyframe that at zero say we go up to 10 seconds and change this value to a hundred and then go preview that we can see that our progress bar changes over time now we can keyframe this in a number of ways or use another expression to drive that progress slider we've got so many options at our disposal but for now this is a pretty easy way to create a progress slider you can see there it's loading up nice and easy and it shows our details like so and remember we can also keep from our null object in order to animate this in and out so we might hit P and keyframe right at the start move it all the way to the bottom and then maybe move it forward just a little bit bring it back up and there we go we've got an animation that kind of brings in our progress bar as it starts counting so we're not interrupting the way that our progress bar actually loads by keyframing anything on our null object so that's how you create a basic progress bar in After Effects remember there's so many different variations that you could do but they all use the same general technique if you liked this video don't forget to leave a like or to subscribe and let us know how you use a progress bar in your next creations until next time my name is bench thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: MediaWorkbench

Views: 4,103

Keywords: adobe, after effects, progress bar, after effects tutorial, media, workbench, tutorial, ae, media workbench, expression, training, bench

Id: yd3Lh1Y2ZVU

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 29 2018