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

Trim Paths

To show and hide a path or reveal a part of it, we could be working with masks; however, Lottie doesn't work very well with them, at least not yet. Using masks can get us in trouble so we are going to try to avoid them and try something else.

Another option could be to draw our check animation frame by frame, so the following keyframe always shows a little bit more of the drawing than the first one, but this would be very time-consuming!

This is where Trim Paths comes into the picture. Using this option can be very helpful and time-saving. Let's see what this can do for us:

  1. Block the Oval layer. In that case, we are not going to hide this layer as it is behind the check layer.
  2. Show and unlock the check layer by pressing the little eye and lock icon.
  3. Open the check layer.
  4. Open the Contents properties and close everything else:

Figure 4.27 – Contents properties

  1. Click on the Add arrow button and select...