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

Understanding our check icon layers

We've got our icon composition sorted and adjusted to our needs; now is the time to understand how our icon is built in terms of layers, so, let's check what we've got in our layers panel.

As you can see in Figure 4.18, when we check the Layer panel, we find the same two layers we had in our illustration file that we just imported, check and Oval.

Just to be clear, check is a stroke and Oval is a shape. This is important and will help us to give the effect that we want to the check layer. But, don't worry for now; we will see that a few steps further in this section.

Figure 4.18 – Layer panel with check and Oval layer properties

Also, as you can see in the preceding screenshot, each of our layers has a lot of sub-layers. We are going to be seeing this in the next steps.

But first, let's recap. Remember, our animation will start with the oval getting bigger.

Suggestion

Since...