Data Animator

Powerful After Effects 3D graphing and animation plug-in set

Data Animator by Digital Anarchy

As is the case with most of Digital Anarchy’s plug-ins for After Effects (AE), which address a need for a specific function or graphic treatment, the new Data Animator plug-in set does an incredible job of creating, animating, and rendering fully functional graph designs directly within your AE composition.

When installed, a set of eight plug-ins appear in After Effects: Bar, Bubble, Line, Pie, Polar, Range/Stock, Timeline, and EasyChart. Creating a Solid and applying any of these effects to it gives you access to a plethora of controls and options for complete—and I mean complete—customization of your chart.

The most important step is to have the required data for the chart as a tab-delimited text file (.txt), which is then imported through the effect interface. It was a little frustrating to rely on an external source file instead of entering the data directly via the interface; however, the plug-ins can be set to scan for an updated text file every time the AE project is opened, so it does have a plus side.

Once the data is in, the plug-in set is yours to explore. A nice feature is that animation of the chart data is automatic, so simply finding your data and then previewing will yield a basic animated result. The real selling point of these plug-ins are their ability to render all of these chart designs in true 3D. Let’s face it—charts are boring. And $495 is a fair asking price for a plug-in set. But with control over color, type, grids, transparency, bars, pies, and lines in true 3D, it’s money well spent for a result above and beyond expectation.

PRICE: $495
FROM: Digital Anarchy
PHONE: 415-462-5872
WEB: www.digitalanarchy.com
FOR: Mac and Windows
RATING: 4