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

Exporting our animation for handoff

To export our animation from AE to a .json file, we can use Bodymovin and LottieFiles plugins for AE. But, do we have to learn both? You are free to use any of them; they are available to download, are free to use, and are fully maintained and supported.

Downloading and Installing the Plugins

For downloading and a how-to installation guide, you can jump ahead to Chapter 6, Don't Stop! Exploring Plugins and Resources That Will Keep You Going, where we will guide you through the process.

So, just choose the one you feel more comfortable with or the one that best matches your workflow. Maybe working with Bodymovin is all you need, however, LottieFiles will give you additional testing and preview tools.

For me, I'm really used to working with Bodymovin, especially because, as you know by now, this was the first plugin ever to exist that would convert your animation into a .json file; it is simple and does the job. But, times change...