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

Wow! That's a lot of stuff we have done here; great job! And you know the best part? You are ready to have some fun and start creating your own animations from scratch to hand off! So far, we've learned how to export our animations from AE as .json files using the Bodymovin and LottieFiles plugins. We've gone through the process to test the exported .json files in AE, desktop, and mobile and realized the importance of testing it on every device before handing it off to the development team.

We've also created an account in the LottieFiles platform and learned all about the LottieFiles dashboard, where you can keep all your animations together. We've discovered Lottie Editor and how to quickly tweak any .json animation by changing the colors, dimensions, speed, and content.

We've also learned how to create very simple but straightforward animations by using static SVG files and also how to convert Lotties to GIFs for our social media or other...