Map animation in After Effects: places, routes and pins, built as layers

How do you make a map animation in After Effects?

Stack a map, put the moving parts on top, and frame it with a camera. In practice that's four layers of work.

1. The map. Satellite, terrain or a flat styled map, made bigger than the comp so the camera has room to travel.
2. The route. A path from A to B on a shape layer, revealed over time.
3. Pins and labels. A marker and a name that stay locked to their city while the map moves.
4. The camera. A push in, a pull out or a fly-along that follows the route.

The question is where the map and the geography come from. After Effects doesn't ship with any, so you either bring a map in and place everything by eye, or use a tool that fetches the data and builds the layers for you.

Can you animate a map in After Effects without a plugin?

Yes. One route on one map is an afternoon's work, and every motion designer should do it once.

1. Get a map you're allowed to use, as an image or an Illustrator file, and note the credit line its licence asks for.
2. Import it. An Illustrator map can become editable shape layers with After Effects' own Create Shapes from Vector Layer command.
3. Draw the route with the Pen tool on a new shape layer, with the stroke on and the fill off.
4. On that layer choose Add › Trim Paths and keyframe End from 0% to 100%. That's the line that draws itself.
5. Make a pin from a small circle and a text layer, parent both to a null and park the null on the city.
6. Add a camera, or move and scale a parent null, and ease the keys.

The pain comes later. Every city is placed by eye, a long-haul flight drawn as a straight line looks wrong to anyone who flies, and a new destination means starting over. Fine once a year. Not fine when a client sends three a week.

What does Map rigs do in the mouzeclick workspace?

Map rigs fetches the map and the geography, and you make the decisions. It sits in Motion lab in the mouzeclick workspace for After Effects (Window › Extensions › mouzeclick workspace) and works in seven steps: Place, Look, Layers, Draw, Story, Move and Maps.

• Find the place. Search a country, city, area or landmark and frame it on the live map. Match the comp, or pick 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1.
• Trace it. A place's outline, a route, a focus frame, buildings and a night layer come in as shape layers.
• Draw on it. Areas, lines, points, boxes, circles, pen paths, arrows and callouts, each as an After Effects layer.
• Tell the story. A story route with stops, pins and focus points, with the rest of the map dimmed and its edges softened.

Then press Create Map in After Effects. If you'd rather type, the panel takes plain steps such as "fly from Mumbai to Dubai; pin London" and builds them in order.

The setting people miss is whose borders to draw. Countries draw disputed borders differently, so you can pick a neutral view (de-facto control) or a country's own view, and every map then matches it. A client will spot a border drawn the wrong way long before they notice your easing.

How do you animate a route on a map in After Effects?

Draw the route as a path and reveal it over time; what changes the result is whether the path follows the earth. Map rigs draws a route as a great-circle line or a straight one. Great-circle is the shortest path over the globe, so on a flat map a Mumbai to London flight bows north, which is exactly what makes it read as a flight. Straight suits short hops and diagrams.

A dot, an arrow, a plane, a car, a boat or your own image can travel the route. For a road trip, routing follows real roads by car, by bike or on foot. Default shape styles are Border, Highlight, Dashed route, Glow outline, Region fill and Ink, and you can add arrows between points. Because the route arrives as a shape layer, Trim Paths draws it on the same way it would by hand, and you can ease it with your own curves from the easing presets.

The order that works for me, step by step.

1. Frame both ends with some air around them.
2. Draw the route, great-circle for anything over a few hundred kilometres.
3. Pin each stop. A pin is a null fixed to a place, so it stays on the city while the map moves under it; parent your own marker or label to it.
4. Add a camera move that follows the route.
5. Time the reveal to the voice-over line that names the destination, not to the start of the shot.

Which map styles can you use in After Effects with Map rigs?

47 base maps in nine groups, plus six one-click style presets, counted in the shipped panel.

The style presets (Dark tech, Paper, Blueprint, Minimal, Cinematic and Neon) set a whole look at once. Terrain shading can be Flat, Hillshade, Deep 3D or Ridged, and imagery recolours live in After Effects with hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, tint and invert. Map furniture adds a scale bar, compass, coordinates, atmosphere glow, country borders, grid lines or a space background.

The passes are the underrated part. Water Mask isolates the sea so you can grade it on its own, and Roads Only with a glow gives a night-drive look without drawing a single mask. Pick colours that match the rest of the edit from the Color desk palettes.

Can you show data on a map in After Effects?

Yes. Map rigs shows your numbers as coloured regions, bubbles, flow arcs, heat maps, spikes or values over time, with five colour ramps and bar or pie diagrams. Colour scales are linear, square root (area), log, quantile or categories.

Use square root for bubbles. Viewers judge a bubble by its area, and if the radius grows in step with the value, a value twice as large draws a circle four times the size.

Bring your own data as GeoJSON, TopoJSON, KML, KMZ, GPX, TCX, CSV, TSV, TXT, WKT or a zipped Shapefile. GPX and TCX are what running and cycling apps export, so a ride can become a route in a few steps. Built-in datasets include countries, states, borders, disputed areas, coastlines, lakes, rivers, cities and urban areas, and query templates find buildings, hospitals, schools, EV charging, railways, parks, cafés, airports and stations in view. Datasets and queries need internet.

How do camera moves and labels work on a map?

Pick a move and Map rigs keys it for you. There are nine: Push in, Pull out, Reveal, Orbit, Drift, Swoop, Follow route, Handheld and Zoom bounce, each with smooth or linear easing. You can also link your own layers to a map view and key latitude, longitude and zoom yourself. If a shot needs more energy on landing, add a hit from the camera shake presets in the same Motion lab.

Labels come from templates (Dot, Pin, Pulse, Callout, Icon, Capital) in any of 15 label languages, with Few, Normal or Many on screen. Choose Few for a 9:16 short: a phone screen can't hold twelve city names. Distance rings, day and night layers and lat-long grids are there for explainers. For title cards over the map, use the text animation presets in Type studio.

How do you make a 3D globe animation in After Effects?

Use mouzelayer, the globe extension, which is a separate panel from Map rigs. It's a 3D globe with terrain. Find a city, a country or coordinates, key the camera, and send a plane, a jet, a ship or a glowing dot between your pins. Ships go by sea, through Suez or Panama. It has six styles (Night, Daylight, Relief, Ink, Neon and Blueprint).

Render to After Effects builds a new comp at comp size, 1080p, 4K, vertical or square, over space, clear or a colour, in one undo step. Routes sit on their own layer with a null following each one for labels, and the pins are layers you can restyle. In the panel, K adds a camera key, Space plays the moves and N puts north up. It needs mouzeclick running with an activated licence and internet for the map data, and the map credit arrives as a layer you should keep visible. Unlike the workspace, it runs on Windows and Mac. Details are on the extensions page.

Why does my After Effects map animation break, and how do you fix it?

Most problems come from tiles, links or moving the project to another computer.

• Grey or missing imagery. Map imagery loads online, so check the connection first. Map finishing can clear the tile cache if old tiles stick.
• Maps break on another computer or a render machine. Before you hand the project over, use Map finishing to render the cached imagery into the project and make the rigs portable. It also repairs links.
• Previews crawl. Finalize at Preview (half size) while you work and at Full size for the export.
• The move keeps changing. Once the camera is locked, bake the map to keyframes in the map manager.
• Wrong borders or wrong language. Change whose borders it shows and the label language, then rebuild.

Is GEOlayers 3 or mouzeclick better for map animation?

If maps are most of your work, GEOlayers 3 is the specialist; if maps are one job among captions, text and cuts, mouzeclick covers them inside one plan. Checked on 31 October 2026:

GEOlayers is the better pick if you want one payment with no subscription mentioned, a scripting API, one-click 3D landscape setups with Helium, FreeForm Pro, Plexus or Trapcode Mir, or map styles made from your comp's colours, an image or an Adobe Swatch file. mouzeclick fits when maps are one job among many and you want them in the same panel as your text, caption and colour tools. See our other comparisons and the all-in-one After Effects extension guide for the rest of the workspace.

Does Map rigs work on Mac, and does it need internet?

Map rigs works on Windows only, and it needs internet. The mouzeclick workspaces are part of mouzeclick on Windows; the Mac app does not include them. The mouzelayer globe is an extension, so it runs on both, and the Mac page lists what else does. Place search, map imagery, datasets and queries all load online, and mouzeclick itself needs an internet connection while it runs.

Questions people ask

Sources

Checked on 2026-10-31. Prices and features change: each link goes to the maker's own page.

1. mouzeclick workspace (Map rigs, Motion lab)
2. mouzeclick extensions (mouzelayer)
3. GEOlayers 3 on aescripts.com (price, compatibility, version history)

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