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

Exploring ease

As the name indicates, ease means moving carefully or gradually. In AE, ease is the effect that allows us to give the impression that our object is moving at different speeds within the same animation. It accelerates or slows down, depending on the effect we want to achieve.

How do we add ease to our animations? Easy – we will add ease by selecting the diamond keyframe in the timeline. Let's try it out!

Remember in the last section when we animated our ball? Let's run it a few times just to remember how it looks (press the spacebar). What's happening?

We can see the ball moving up and down at a constant speed, which looks unnatural. Remember the 12 principles of animation we talked about back in Chapter 2, Creating the Illusion: Get Rolling With the Basic Principles of 2D Classic Animation? Ease is one of the 12 principles; real-life objects don't move at a regular speed.

To make the movement look more natural, we want our bouncing...