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

Summary

We are done! Yes, in just one chapter. Don't be surprised; as we said earlier, we've got to be practical here. There's no need to start learning every single tool, panel, action, or expression available in AE, as there are so many things we don't need to know for our Lottie animations. So, we wanted to keep it simple for you.

In this chapter, we've discovered the AE workspace area, talked about the main panels, and got experience with real files with working with compositions, the timeline, and layers. We've been through layer properties, learned what the Parent & Link feature is and how to apply it to our layers, and learned how to create our first animation while explaining how to use keyframes to finally refine it, thanks to ease and the Graph Editor panel.

Looking back to the first part of the book, we've come a long way. We've learned what Lottie is, the principles of animation, and the basics of Adobe AE; we are now ready...