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

Basic installation

Installing lottie-react-native follows a similar process as any other npm library, taking into account that it's a library that depends on native libraries written in Swift and Java. Taking this into account, developers can always read about the installation process in the GitHub repository URL: https://github.com/lottie-react-native/lottie-react-native.

When installing lottie-react-native, developers should know that, because of the way it is built, the iOS native library for Lottie should also be installed to enable lottie-react-native to render Lottie animations in iOS apps.

Let's take a look at the steps we need to follow in order to complete a successful installation.

Using npm

Follow these steps to install the lottie-react-native library using npm:

  1. Navigate to our terminal in the React Native project root folder. Once we are there, we should run the following command:
    npm i --save lottie-react-native

This command will follow...