Book Image

UI Animations with Lottie and After Effects

By : Mireia Alegre Ruiz, Emilio Rodriguez Martinez
Book Image

UI Animations with Lottie and After Effects

By: Mireia Alegre Ruiz, Emilio Rodriguez Martinez

Overview of this book

Lottie is a small and scalable JSON-based animation file. LottieFiles is the platform where Lottie animations can be uploaded, tested, and shared. By combining the LottieFiles plugin and the LottieFiles platform, you’ll be able to create stunning animations that are easy to integrate in any device. You’ll also see how to use the Bodymovin plugin in After Effects to export your animation to a JSON file. The book starts by giving you an overview of Lottie and LottieFiles. As you keep reading, you’ll understand the entire Lottie ecosystem and get hands-on with classic 2D animation principles. You’ll also get a step-by-step guided tour to ideate, sketch for storytelling, design an icon that will fulfill the needs and expectations of users based on UX, and finally animate it in Adobe After Effects. This will help you get familiar with the After Effects environment, work with vector shape layers, create and modify keyframes using layer properties, explore path and mask features, and adjust timing easily to create professional-looking animations. By the end of this animation book, you’ll be able to create and export your own Lottie animations using After Effects and implement them in mobile apps using React Native. You’ll also have an understanding of 2D animation best practices and principles that you can apply in your own projects.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1 - Building a Foundation With After Effects and LottieFiles
5
Part 2 - Cracking Lottie Animations
9
Part 3 - Adding Your Lottie Animations Into Mobile Apps

Chapter 3: Learning the Tools: Getting Familiar With After Effects

Hi again! Now that we have expanded our knowledge of 2D animation, gone through classic animation history, learned about its principles, and have our sketches and storyboard ready to go, let's move on. Let's talk about Adobe After Effects (AE).

So, why Adobe AE? Well, as you know by now, Bodymovin was the first plugin ever created to export animations into .json files, and this plugin was made for AE. These days, more and more integrations between Lottie and animation tools are being released, which is a good sign, as it shows how popular Lottie is becoming among animators, designers, and developers. Lottie for Adobe Animate is an example; however, most of them are still at an early stage and not all features are available yet, so we will keep our focus on AE for now.

AE can be as simple or as complex as you want; from creating a small animated icon to a huge post-production cinema movie project, it...