Create animated dashed lines in After Effects by utilizing dingbat fonts like Wingdings to simulate shapes through text characters. Learn how to align these glyphs to custom paths, enabling more flexible and controllable shape animations than traditional shape layers.
Key Insights
- Using dingbat fonts such as Wingdings allows designers to create and animate shape-like elements (e.g., squares, circles) by treating them as text characters rather than vector shapes.
- Text layers in After Effects can be positioned on custom paths, such as ellipses, allowing precise circular alignment and more granular control over animation properties.
- Unlike shape layers, text layers with glyph-based designs offer more flexibility for transformations and animation staging, especially when the design requires fixed points like a locked bottom edge.
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So I've created the rings that we use as part of this graphic. Right now I'm in the graph percentage bars comp. Now it's time to make the dashed lines here.
And I could actually make a circle and I could actually add dashed lines to it. But then I wouldn't be able to animate it the way I want. My goal for the animation is to have the bottom locked in and to have it literally grow on top in stages.
And honestly, the best way to do that that I could figure is text. The thing that I said about text is it's not always words. A font file, font files on your computer can technically be anything at all.
It assigns a specific glyph, a specific image to each letter. But there's no rules as the actual glyphs the characters assigned have to be letters. You have fonts that are circles, squares, graphics.
I have a font that is Bob Marley shapes or Hello Kitty shapes or butterflies. No problem at all. There's lots of free, cool, funky fonts online.
And if you're so inclined, you can also make your own in programs like Adobe Illustrator and other places. So there's a lot of ways to get some really cool fonts. But there's also a font that is included on both Windows and Mac called Wingdings and another one called Webdings.
These are what are called dingbat fonts. Fonts that aren't based on letters but are in fact characters or symbols. And so there's a lot of them included.
You can get more. You can make your own and have a lot of fun with this. And sometimes when you see graphic animation, shape animation in After Effects, it's in fact text that's being animated.
Not actual shapes or outlines. Okay. So I need to make some text.
I'll take my type tool. And I'm going to click. Okay.
And that's going to create a text layer, by the way. And I'm going to go change this. I'm going to go to text, little menu here, reset character.
I'm going to find paragraph here in properties and reset paragraph. So it returns everything to its out-of-the-box default setting. What I'm looking for here is actually a font called Wingdings.
If I just type it in, I'll find it. There's actually several on my Mac. Wingdings is the one I want.
Okay. And I'm going to double click the text layer to get my type cursor back to typing. And I'm just going to type a lowercase letter in.
In, in, in, in, in. I'll do it five more times to get 10 of them. Okay.
And that is the square. That is the lowercase letter in in the Wingdings font. Okay.
So the Wingdings font just has characters instead. And it's a whole bunch of really cool ones, by the way. If you do a Google search on like Wingdings glyphs or Wingdings like character map, you'll find a whole bunch of like websites.
It'll show you what they all are. I highlighted the text. And I'm just using the eyedropper for fill to just sample from that same gray.
Again, I can recolor this later. No problem at all. If you click and drag over these characters, just like you do with letters when you're typing, you can format just them.
If you want to format everything, you click on the layer itself. Now, whatever changes I make are layer wide. Okay.
And that's what I want to do for this. So the first thing I want to do is put these in a circle. So text layers have an option called text on a path.
So I'm going to go find that ellipse again. This time I have my in layer selected. I'm going to double click on the ellipse.
And it's going to put a mask that matches the dimensions, the width and height of the comp. And for some reason, I've never really figured this out. It's actually in the... It's not centered on the comp.
It's up to the side. So I'll just take my selection tool. Selection tool is active.
Double click one of the points. That'll give me a free transform bounding box around it. I'm just going to drag it so it's more lined up with the center.
Okay. Again, unfortunately, this is an example of where I cannot use a line because it would align the actual text layer, not the mask itself. So I'm just going to basically approximate it to the size.
Okay. That looks pretty good. Then I'm going to resize it.
I'll hold down shift. I'll grab the corner and I'm just going to bring it in so it matches basically the center of the line. Right about there.
That's what I'm going for. I'm trying to put it in the middle of this. To finalize the transformation, I'm going to press the return or enter key on my keyboard.
I can also just click someplace else. Like here would finalize it as well. Okay.
