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

The importance of testing in desktop and mobile LottieFiles platforms

And, here we are, about to upload our animations to LottieFiles and get them ready to hand off. This is a very exciting moment for me. I see three big milestones when animating for Lottie. First, when we render our animation in AE using Bodymovin or LottieFiles plugins and we check everything works; the second big moment is this, right here, right now, when we are about to upload it into the platform to check everything works fine, and the third one is when our animation is live! But, let's not hurry; let's upload our icon and check everything is working nicely.

There are three ways to preview our .json animations:

  • In the preview window of the LottieFiles plugin for AE.
  • Upload, preview, and handoff in the LottieFiles browser platform.
  • Preview in the LottieFiles apps for Android and iOS.

Previewing .json files using the LottieFiles plugin for AE

As we've already seen earlier...