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

Introduction to 2D animation

So, what is animation? Animation is the faculty to bring to life something that doesn't have it. When we talk about classic 2D animation, we are referring to a series of still images, drawn separately and slightly tweaked from one another; when combined, they produce the illusion of movement.

From prehistoric times, we can find references to animation that are are almost as old as humans. If we go back to 35,000 years ago when humans used to live in caves, we find figures of drawn animals with several legs, which was their way of representing the idea of movement.

Figure 2.1 – Eight legs to show motion

Ancient Egyptians and Greeks used to draw separate images with little tweaked arms or legs to give the impression of moving figures as well. So, we can say animation has been used forever and in every culture.

Figure 2.2 – Representation of the Ancient Egyptian goddess Isis in the columns...