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

Animating using the Parent & Link option

In the last section, we learned how to apply properties to a layer. Now, what if we want different layers to behave in the same way? Do we have to change the properties in all of these layers? Well, not really!

In AE, we can link one layer to another one by parenting. The main layer is called a parent and the linked layer will be called a child. Simply put, we can say that parenting is a way to group layers.

Here are some aspects to keep in mind:

  • A layer can only have one parent, but each parent layer can have as many children as we want.
  • We can animate child layers on their own.
  • When creating parenting, we can choose whether the child is going to adopt the parent's properties or not.

But where is the parent option? It is placed in the Layer panel; however, sometimes it can be hidden. If that's so, just right-click anywhere in the top bar in your Layer panel to reveal a new menu. Choose Columns | Parent...