Creating a perfect motion path in After Effects.
The common way of creating a motion path in After Effects is to click on the stopwatch and move an element around in the Composition Window. For those more adventurous, they might take out the pen tool to custom create points on the path and move the handles.
There is a much quicker and neater way to accomplish this and at the same time evenly distribute the points through time.
Let’s say we have a spaceman who has stumbled upon a Black Hole (or if that is too scary let’s say it is a Worm Hole). He is going to get sucked into this hole, much like water circles down the drain. If only there was a way too…
Let me cut you off right there. The “motion” that we want here is perfectly expressed by a spiral, which conveniently is a tool in Illustrator. If you create a composition that is the same size as your comp, you can just draw a spiral that neatly fills the artboard. Select and copy it.
Copy is nothing without paste. Inside of After Effects, select your layer AND then select the POSITION value. If you don’t do this step it will not work. Now Paste. you should get a tight set of keyframes all fitting within two seconds.
Notice if you pull one of the edge keyframes out, the others follow proportionally. 
If you have never seen this before, these are known as Roving Keyframes.
Now if you play back your comp, you spaceman should be going into the spiral. Add a little decreasing scale animation and you should have a quick and easy animation of your spaceman being sucked into the vortex.
Note: This can also be done by copying path shapes inside of After Effects and pasting them onto the layers position value. In this case Illustrator is preferred because of the spiral shape.
