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

Converting Lottie to GIF in just one click

If we are learning how to work with Lottie, it is because we want to avoid adding animated GIF files to our apps and websites as much as possible. As we said earlier in this book, GIF files can be very heavy file-size-wise, have low-quality images, and won't be responsive. However, sometimes, we may need this kind of format, for example, to use it for some social media posts.

LottieFiles gives us the option to convert the .json file to GIF in the blink of an eye, and here is how:

  1. Go to https://lottiefiles.com/lottie-to-gif.
  2. Browse for the lottie/chapter05/LottietoGIF.json file provided with this book (this is the Lottie we created in the Converting SVGs to animated Lotties in seconds section).
  3. Open the LottietoGIF.json file:

Figure 5.42 – Lottie to GIF feature view

Great! As you can see, it is pretty straightforward. We see our animated star in the center of the screen, and a couple...