Free After Effects Path Arrow Preset

Hey! Want to hear something ridiculous?! After Effects has absolutely no inherent tool that can add an arrowhead to a vector path. What?! If you want to create and animate an arrow, you are on your own. That is a tiny little thing, but it absolutely blows my mind.

There are all kinds of convoluted things you can do to slap an arrow on a path, but really the easiest way is just get Easy Arrows — That wills et you back 30 bucks though. If you are looking for another easy and free solution, Mikey Borup shared a preset that allows you to quickly make and animate arrows.

The After Effects Path Arrow Preset works with Text Animators, and a path. It will build you an arrow that you can easily animate around as you would any other text animator in AE.

In fact, Mikey shows how it was done, by using lots of “periods” and a typed out triangle shape. Again, it is absolutely outrageous that you should have to do something like this in Ae just to get arrowheads going. To Mikey’s credit though, this is rather brilliant.

You can get the Arrowhead preset on Cinema Spice, the title did say free, but you can kick Mikey some scratch for doing a job that clearly should be Adobe’s… show you appreciation.