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

Summary

It wasn't that hard, was it? We've finished our first professional-looking animation in no time! Our customers won't feel confused after the purchase and our app will look much better. Win-win-win!

In this chapter, we've been through a real project and learned the UX animation AE workflow. We have now covered the whole process, from ideation to final animation. We know how to read and understand storyboards, we've learned how to import our assets to AE, set up a composition, create keyframes, and modify layer properties such as Scale, Position, Rotation, and Opacity to create our animation. We've also learned how to use Trim Paths and radial bursts to create special effects, how to adjust timing, and how to apply Ease to finalize our project.

Let's move on to the next chapter, where we will learn how to export our animation as a .json file and preview it on the LottieFiles platform. See you there!