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

Adding Keyframes

Great! Now that we are more familiar with our layers, and the Oval is on its own, and there's no danger that we are going to move the check icon, even by mistake, let's start creating some movement.

Remember back in Chapter 3, Learning the Tools: Getting Familiar With After Effects, when we talked about keyframes? Exactly! Keyframes are used to create movement and to do that, we need at least two of them: one keyframe as a starting point and one as an ending point.

That said, we want our Oval to grow from 0 to 100%, right? Any idea about how to do that? Sure, we will create two keyframes and change the scale of the Oval, so one keyframe will be 0% and the other 100%. Let's do that now.

Changing scale

We are going to start by animating the scale. How do we do that? By adjusting the scale's Oval properties, at specific keyframes. Here's how to do it:

  1. Go to the Layer panel.
  2. Open the Oval layer's Transform properties...