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

Adjusting our icon composition settings

Remember back in Chapter 3, Learning the Tools: Getting Familiar With After Effects, we talked about compositions, what they are, and what we use them for? Cool. Now is the time to start putting everything we've learned into context.

When we import our icon to AE, it normally gets imported as a composition. Remember, compositions are shown in the Project panel, and to open one, we just need to double-click on it.

Now, how is this composition imported to AE? Are the main specifications of this composition the ones we want? Let's check it out. Let's check our Composition Settings icon:

Figure 4.17 – Composition Settings window view

Let's adjust some of these settings. Remember how to do that? Here are the instructions:

  1. Select your composition from the Project panel.
  2. Select Composition | Composition Settings from the top menu.
  3. Adjust the composition size to 250 x 250 px.
  4. ...