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

Supported Lottie features for iOS, Android, and the web

As we experienced a couple of chapters ago, Lottie does not support all features of Adobe AE. So, before we start creating our animations in AE, it is a good idea to have a look at the following tables if we want to avoid frustration and extra work. As we mentioned earlier, in this book, we are going to focus on iOS, Android, and web-supported features. However, you can check the following tables for supported features on Windows devices as well.

The simpler the better. It is good practice to keep our files tidy and create simple illustrations with single paths and fills. I recommend trying to avoid Boolean options directly in AE (we will see more about it in a minute), and the use of images, masks, and effects, as these features are not well supported on all devices. I also recommend creating animations that will work across all platforms and devices so that we don't need different .json files for each of them.

Shapes...