Best way to make a 2D animated arrow in Unity

[dlorre]

While I can make plain arrows fairly easily I would like them to be animated. There are so many options I don’t know which one to pick:

Make a mesh

Make a svg sprite

Make an UI Element (UI Toolkit)

While it’s probably much easier to animate with it, I’d rather not use UI Toolkit because I’d like to use a Shader with it.

Ideally I’d like something like the After Effects animated path:

How To Create Animated Arrows In After Effects (easiest method - no clickbait!)

Can I do something like that in Unity?

[DevDunk]

The easiest way is to do this with with sprite animations
To make it fancier you can make it into a spline and animate that probably? Then it is fully procedural

Using a mesh and walking over the UVs might also work, not sure

[dlorre]

Thanks, I’ve been looking into VFXGraph, it seems that particles can also be interesting.

[dlorre]

Finally I’m going for a line renderer with a laser shader from Gabriel Aguiar. I’m not sure whether I should make arrow tips or not (but I definitely can). It’s also not difficult to animate, a simple coroutine can do that.