Arrow Animation

[Anonymous]

I am building an industrial 3D model and need to animate some arrows to show flow. The following link is close to the effect I am trying to create:

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/?id=3223115&refnum=375718

The only alteration I need to this type of animation is for the arrow tip to always be visible.

Anyone have suggestions on how best to animate this and would it be best to do it in a compositing program?

[hendris]

There are a number of possible ways to do this but the easiest is to model your arrow as a mesh (it needs to be a fairly dense mesh to stand up to the deformations) Now draw a spline line that represents the path of the animation. From here simply apply a path deform world space modifier to the arrow. you will see a pick path button to select your spline. Now click the move to path button. From here you may need to change which axis the arrow is deforming along. Now you can animate the percent and stretch to get your effect.

[Anonymous]

Another possibility is to model each arrow in it's final position ("drawn in") and then put a gradient map in the opacity slot (one that looks like: white...white|black...black if that makes any sense) and animate the position of the map to "swipe" across the arrows. This will only work if none of the arrow double back on themselves.