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

Why are we not using Animated or Reanimated?

A common question for React Native beginners is which library they should use for displaying animations on their apps. After a quick search, three different ways of doing so arise: the Animated API, Reanimated, or lottie-react-native.

Animated and Reanimated are not technologies that compete lottie-react-native as they serve different purposes. Both Animated and Reanimated excel in animating React and native components on iOS and Android, but they are based on transforming mobile UI components (for example, Text, Containers, Views, or Lists). This means they are not designed to create complex animations or visual icons, which designers can do with Adobe After Effects.

Let's look at an example of what Animated/Reanimated can do versus what Lottie is capable of:

What Lottie does easily:

Figure 7.1 – Typical lottie-react-native animation

What Animated and Reanimated do well:

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