Animating inforgraphics: Fancy pie charts

- Here's another common way you might want to animate the wedges of a pie chart. Like this. Let's take a look in the Preview panel. Here, the wedges kind of grow into position. It's an effect that looks simple enough, but actually, multiple steps are required to set it up. I'll show you how it's done. I'm gonna go to the next page of this file, and I've taken the animation off of one of these wedges so we can see how it's done more clearly. I'm gonna open the Layers panel, and you can see that each wedge has been put in its own layer.

I'll isolate our wedge that we're gonna be working on by holding down the opt or alt key, and clicking on the little visibility symbol here. Basically, for this technique we are going to have a wedge that hides this one and moves off position of this wedge. It's going to rotate in a way that makes this wedge look like it's growing. The first step is to duplicate this wedge, because we have to make a copy that will hide this one. There's several ways to do this. One way I like to do it, is to select it, and then go to Step and Repeat.

Set the vertical and the horizontal offset to zero, and a count of one. That way you have a duplicate right on top of this one, right in position already. Here's the wedge we just made a copy of. I'll add a name to that, so I don't get confused, I'll call it "wedge one-white". And I'm going to apply the color [Paper] to it, so that it hides that wedge. Now, we need this wedge to rotate off of the color wedge, but we can't just have it rotate on this point.

It might work on some wedges, but when we have really narrow wedges it won't work at all. We need to have the tip of this wedge be the center point of rotation, and for that, we're going to have to establish a different center point. We'll do that with another wedge. I'm going to make sure my proxy is selected here at the corner, and then I'm going to make a duplicate of this that's just opposite of it. In the Rotate field, I'm going to type "180 degrees" but before I press return, I'm going to hold down the opt key, and then press return.

That makes a copy of it directly opposite. This wedge, I don't want it to hide anything. I'm just using it to change the center point of these wedges for rotation purposes. So I'm gonna apply the color [None] to this one. Now I'll make them a Group. I'll select the other wedge, and cmd or ctrl + g to group them. Now I have a shape that when I rotate from its center point, it will cause this wedge, the hiding wedge, to rotate off perfectly.

I'm going to set the rotation, in this case, to the minimum amount necessary to expose the color wedge underneath. I'll rotate this 90 degrees. There we go. And I'm gonna give it a name, I'm gonna call it "hide-wedge-01". I need to keep track of these wedges. One thing that's very important in this little trick is the order of the layers these are in. Now, I'm going to turn on the background and show you what this one wedge is doing.

I'll show it to you in the Preview panel. See what's happening? That white wedge is going off of the color wedge. But there's one more step we want, because I don't want this white wedge hanging out here, because it's gonna hide other wedges in my pie chart. The last setting that I want to do here is say, "When you've shown me the wedge, get out of here." Hide After Animating. Let's turn on our other layers, our other wedges, and take a look at the Timing panel. I'm gonna make sure that this wedge goes first.

Again, the order of the timing and the layering is key to the success of this technique. Let's look at it in the Preview panel. Wedge one, two, three, four, five. I like the effect of this technique very much. It's a little tricky, I suppose, you could say it's like baking a pie in the kitchen. The more you put into it, the better the result.