• Adobe After Effects

  Animating a layer along an animated path

  Posted by Troy Benesch on August 8, 2011 at 6:24 pm

  Stumped. I need to create a continuous flow of arrows along a path. This by itself was easy by copying the path and pasting it into the ‘position’ of the layer and I get a roving keyframe. Now the problem I’m facing is that the original path needs to animate over time while the arrows continue to follow the path during the animated motion. For example, say you want to animate a flow of continuous arrows that go from the bottom of the screen to the top. Then 3 seconds in, you want the path of the arrows to bend to make an ‘S’ shape. Then 3 seconds later, the path changes again to a completely different shape. All the while, the arrows are flowing along in a continuous manner. Thoughts?

  Thanks.

  Troy

  Michael Szalapski replied 15 years ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Kevin Camp

  August 8, 2011 at 8:12 pm

  can you make a really long motion path… larger than the screen. then parent the arrow(s) to a null and then keyframe the null to move along and keep a portion of the arrows and their path in frame. or you could use a 3d camera to do something similar if all the arrows are 3d too.

  Kevin Camp
  Senior Designer
  KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
• 

  Michael Szalapski

  August 9, 2011 at 2:01 pm

  I was hoping you could use an animated flow map with Foam, but apparently you can’t do that. BOOOO!
  Feature request? I think so!

  In addition to Dave’s suggestion to use the puppet tool, you could also try bezier warp or mesh warp.

  – The Great Szalam
  (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

  No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

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