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

Getting to know the AE workspace

Before we start, we are assuming you have already installed the Adobe AE software and the Bodymovin and LottieFile plugins, so we are ready to start. You can find a step by step installation guide ahead in Chapter 6, Don't Stop! Exploring Plugins and Resources That Will Keep You Going. So, if you haven't installed your plugins yet, now is the time to do it.

Cool, so are you all set and ready to go? Let's do it then:

  1. Let's open up AE and click on the Create a New Project button. So, what we can see here, as shown in Figure 3.1, is AE's standard workspace organized by a variety of panels and windows.
  2. For our animation projects, we are going to focus on the Project, Composition, and Layers and Timeline panels, so let's set up our workspace.

Figure 3.1 – The Adobe AE workspace

Customizing our workspace

AE offers a flexible space with tools and windows that we can manage...