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

Creating and editing a Lottie without using AE

That last section was a bit of a low kick; we were all really happy with our cool animation and now what? The nice effect won't show on iOS. Well, these things happen sometimes. We now have three choices:

  • Complain about it.
  • Go back to AE and add some little circles around our animation, one by one.
  • Be lean and just remove the radial burst effect.

I'll go with the third option and you'll see how quick that is. We don't even need to go back to AE. Let's open Lottie Editor. To do that, follow these steps:

  1. Go to the LottieFiles web dashboard.
  2. Go to the left menu and select My Private Animations.
  3. Click on the check_icon animation.
  4. Click on the Edit Animation button, as highlighted in Figure 5.31:

Figure 5.31 – Edit Animation button in LottieFiles desktop dashboard preview window

Lottie Editor appears and here is where we can also perform...