There are a lot of ways to create animated arrows in After Effects. Some tutorials might even suggest using the pick whip and expressions and all. But it’s actually really easy to create with just 2 clicks and in this tutorial, you will learn how.
First, select the pen tool and start drawing your path on the canvas. Make sure the fill is set to transparent and the stroke is set to opaque so you can actually see the path you are drawing. You can always go in and tweak the path so it’s nice and round.
Now go to this newly created shape layer in your timeline and twirl open the little triangle. Here open the ‘Shape‘ and then the ‘Path’. Now click and copy this Path parameter. We are going to need this to actually animate the arrowhead later.
While here click on ‘Add‘ on the upper right and add a ‘Trim Paths‘ property. This will animate the line or the ‘body‘ of the arrow. When you open this parameter (again the little triangle next to the name) you will see the ‘Start‘ and ‘End‘ values. With these 2 values, you can animate both ends of the path. We are going to use the ‘End‘ value. Set a keyframe with ‘0‘ then move the play head over a little bit and then set another keyframe with a value of ‘100‘.
Next, we are going to create the head of the arrow. Select the ‘Star‘ tool from the tool menu and start dragging in your canvas. Hold down the shift key to restrict it to a 0 or 90-degree value.
Pro Tip: While dragging you can adjust the number of spikes of the star. Since we need a triangle we can leave it at 3 spikes!
Now swap the stroke and fill so you’re left with a regular triangle so it actually looks like animated arrows.
Before we leave this, we want to center the pivot point remember we just randomly started dragging on the canvas. When you use the shortcut CTRL/CMD + ALT/OPTION + HOME it will center the pivot point to the graphic!
Remember how we had copied the path earlier? Now it’s time to align the arrowhead to the path. Just open up the position value and paste (CTRL/CMD + V). That will automatically create 2 keyframes (with multiple ‘Roving’ keyframes in between) following the path!
Now click on the arrowhead, right-click and select ‘Transform -> Auto Orient‘. In the pop-up select ‘Orient Along Path‘. This will make sure the arrowhead stays aligned when moving along the path.
Depending on how you created the arrowhead you might rotate it by 90 degrees so it points to the direction of movement.
As the last step, you might want to ease this animation by selecting both layers, hitting the ‘U’ key (to show all keyframes), and hitting the hotkey F9 (or right-click then ‘Keyframe Assistant’ -> Easy Ease‘).
