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Animate anything (SVG, DOM, canvas, generic objects, whatever) along a motion path in any browser. Define the path using an SVG <path> or an Array of points. The magical "align" feature bends coordinate systems and really sets it apart. You can even edit the path in-browser using MotionPathHelper! Video Feature highlights Magical align capabilities that bend coordinate systems in order to position the target exactly on top of the path (or move the path to the target), regardless of how deeply nested they are inside different transformed containers! This is insanely convenient and no other tool on the web offers this functionality! autoRotate makes the target rotate automatically in the direction of the path as it moves. Define specific start and/or end positions on the path (progress values from 0-1). Even wrap around or go backwards! A separate MotionPathHelper tool for Club GreenSock members enables interactive editing of the path directly in the browser! No need to supply an SVG path - you can provide raw coordinates through which to plot a curved path, complete with adjustable curviness, or if your Array has cubic bezier coordinates just set type: "cubic". You can even have a path go through non-positional properties like scale, rotation, or ANYTHING! That will basically smooth out the velocity changes as it hits each value, like: [{scale:0.5, rotation:10}, {scale:1, rotation:-10}, {scale:0.8, rotation:3}]. Loads of helper methods for doing advanced things like: Convert native SVG shapes like <circle>, <rect>, etc. into an equivalent <path> (convertToPath()) Calculate the relative position data between any two DOM elements so that you can move one to align perfectly with another, even if they're inside different containers that have various transforms applied! (getRelativePosition()) Convert SVG <path> data into raw cubic bezier data/numbers (or the other way around) (stringToRawPath()/rawPathToString()) Get matrix data for converting between coordinate spaces (convertCoordinates() / getGlobalMatrix() / getAlignMatrix()) Check out the MotionPathPlugin Demos collection on CodePen! Demo Sample code gsap.to("#div", { motionPath: { path: "#path", align: "#path", alignOrigin: [0.5, 0.5], autoRotate: true }, duration: 5, ease: "power1.inOut" }); Usage details (docs) Check out the MotionPathPlugin docs for all the details. How do I get it? MotionPathPlugin is included in the free download, so it's available via the CDN, Github, NPM, and Yarn too! See the installation page for all the options. MotionPathHelper (which lets you live-edit the path inside the browser) is a members-only benefit of Club GreenSock. If you're not a member yet, animation superpowers await! Demos MotionPath Showcase MotionPath How-To Demos

Note: This page was created for GSAP version 2. We have since released GSAP 3 with many improvements. We recommend using GSAP 3's motionPath instead of the approach outlined here. Please see the GSAP 3 release notes for details. GSAP's BezierPlugin enables you to animate any object along a complex bezier curve. However, it isn't simple for most people to generate the exact coordinates of all the anchor and control points needed to describe a Cubic or Quadratic bezier curve. MorphSVGPlugin to the rescue MorphSVGPlugin's main responsibility is morphing SVG paths and in order to do that, it converts SVG path data internally into bezier curves. We thought it would be convenient to allow users to tap into that functionality. MorphSVGPlugin.pathDataToBezier() converts SVG <path> data into an array of cubic Bezier points that can be fed into a BezierPlugin tween (basically using it as a motion guide)! Watch the video Demo Aren't there other tools that do this? Sure, you could find some github repos or dusty old WordPress blogs that have some tools that move objects along a path. The problem is, what do you do when you need to incorporate one of these animations with other effects? Before long you're loading 5 different tools from different developers and none of the tools can "talk to each other". Choreographing a complex animation becomes a nightmare. What happens when you need to pause or reverse an animation from one of these "free" tools? Chances are you'll be spending dozens of hours trying to make it all work. With GSAP, all our plugins work seamlessly together. Any animation you create using any plugin can be synchronized with hundreds of others. Suppose your client comes to you with a small project with the following requirements: Morph a hippo into an elephant Progressively reveal a curved path Animate the elephant along the path Display captions for each animation Make sure you can play, pause, and reverse the entire sequence Sounds silly, but something like this should be a breeze. How many hours are you going to spend just looking for the tools you need? With GSAP you can build it all in under an hour, with less than a dozen lines of code. See the Pen Sequence of Bonus Plugins by GreenSock (@GreenSock) on CodePen. The demo above uses MorphSVG, DrawSVG and ScrambleText which are available to Club GreenSock members. For more information check out the many benefits of joining Club GreenSock.