How To Make a Cool Progress Bar With A Percentage Count in After Effects

In today’s article we’re going to take a look at how to create a nice looking progress bar animation inside After Effects and we’ll also create a percentage counter using a simple expression and a slider control. So, without further ado let’s jump right into it and see how it’s done

The Steps To Creating the Progress Bar

First, we’ll create a new composition by pressing Ctrl+N and we’ll set it to 1920x1080px Next, we’ll go into the pen tool and make sure the stroke is on and the pixels are around 100.   We’ll set the fill to transparent. Click to create a line and if you hold down shift, it will make it perfectly straight. Next, we’ll bring down the menu and we’ll add a trim path. Open up the trim menu and we’ll set the “end” to 0 and turn on the stopwatch to add a keyframe then move the cursor in time and set the value to 100 and also ease the keyframes by selecting them, right click and choosing Keyframe Assistant – Easy Ease For advanced users, you can go into the graph editor and move the bezier handles until you get a nice looking curve. Make sure you’re in the speed editor graph setup We’re also going to enable the motion blur for the comp as well as for the layer Next, we’re going to select the rectangle tool and this time set the stroke to 3 and draw a shape around the line (make sure no layer in selected in the composition panel) Select the text tool and click on the screen but for now, we won’t add any text. In the effects, & Presets panel to search for slider control and double-click to add it to the text layer We’ll toggle down the Text menu dropdown and the Slider Control Menu and alt+click on the Source Text stopwatch and parent it to the Slider effect below In the slider control expression line, we’re going to add Math.round() to the existing one so, in the end, it should look like this “Math.round(effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”) Next, we’re going to add a keyframe for the slider at 0 value, move the cursor in time and increase the value to 100. We’ll also add another text layer just with the percentage “%” sign We’ll also make sure that all the layers have motion blur enabled. And this concludes our tutorial on how to make animated progress bars in After Effects. Thank you for taking the time to read this article and stay tuned for more cool tips and tricks coming soon.