Sign in Get Celas Studio
Docs Animation

Follow Path

Attach a layer to a Shape layer's contour so it rides along it, keyframing how far along the path it has travelled instead of where it is.

Follow Path constrains a layer's anchor to sit on a Shape layer's contour, and lets you animate its position along that contour instead of animating X and Y by hand. It is built for things that travel a fixed route: a car on a road, a leaf on a curled vine, a bead sliding along a wire.

Attaching a layer to a path

Open the Properties panel for the layer that should move and find the Follow Path row, directly under Anchor. Pick the target from the Follow Path combo, which lists every Shape layer with at least two points; a layer can never follow itself, so it is left off its own list. The button beside the combo arms a viewport picker instead: click any path in the canvas to target it, or press Esc to cancel.

The Follow Path row in Properties, showing the target combo, the viewport-pick button and the Progress field on a closed path with its lap counter.

Progress along the path

Progress is how far along the path the layer sits, as a percentage of the path's length. On an open path it clamps between 0% and 100%: the layer stops at either end. On a closed path it wraps instead: Progress becomes a signed value from -100% to 100%, negative running backwards, and a separate lap counter next to it (-999 to 999) tracks whole trips around the loop, so you can send a layer around more than once without it snapping back to 0%.

Distance is measured along the actual curve length, not by the path's underlying bezier math, so equal steps of Progress move the layer equal distances even where the path's control points bunch up around a tight curve.

Orientation and offset

Turn on Orient to path and the layer rotates to match the path's direction of travel at its current position, so a car banks into the curve instead of sliding along it sideways. This orientation is added on top of the layer's own Rotation value, not a replacement for it. You can still spin the layer with its ordinary Rotation keyframes while it follows the path.

An additional degrees offset lets you rotate that facing without touching Rotation itself, useful when your artwork does not point along its own local X axis. It has no numeric field in Properties; you set it by keyframing the Follow Path sub-track directly, in the Timeline or the Graph Editor.

Keyframing progress

Progress carries the same inline key diamond as any other animatable field in Properties, and Auto Key arms it the same way. Animate Progress from 0% to 100% over a run of frames and the layer travels the whole path at whatever pace your easing gives it; hold it steady and the layer parks at one point on the path.

The layer's own Position keyframes still apply on top of the constraint: the anchor is placed exactly on the path, then your Position value offsets it from there, so nudging Position slides the layer off to one side of the path rather than breaking the follow.

A path cannot be a descendant of the layer following it: that would be a cycle. If an ancestor of the follower is scaled to zero, the follow is skipped for that frame instead of producing a broken pose.
Following runs after bone deformation, so a path-follower carried on a rigged layer follows the path in its posed shape, not its rest pose.