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

Storyboarding

Cool! We've talked to our client, we understood the problem and the users' worries and needs, and came up with an idea. We decided to add a new screen at the end of the process with a check icon to emphasize the idea that the purchase has been made. We've sketched our icon, we know what we want, and now what? Are we going to open AE? Not yet!

It is true we've got our icon sketched and ready to illustrate so we could jump to any vector illustration tool, but do we know what we want our icon to do? For example, how is the icon going to appear on the new screen? From transparent to opaque? From small to big? From left to right? We have to make all these decisions in order to be ready to start setting everything up in AE.

Of course, you could decide this on the go, especially if we are talking about a simple animation, but we want to show you the right process to follow, so if you have a more complicated animation, you'll know how to proceed...