Haiku – Lottie Without After Effects

Remember Lottie? It’s a library that can play back animations in React (Native) using a JSON file. One would define the animation in After Effects, and then export it to a JSON file for Lottie to use. But what if you don’t have After Effects? And is AE really the tool to do this job? …

Implement FLIP transitions easily with flipping

Back in 2015 Paul Lewis published a brilliant article named FLIP your animations, a technique to getting smooth animations on the web. FLIP stands for First, Last, Invert, Play First: before anything happens, record the current (i.e., first) position and dimensions of the element that will transition. You can use element.getBoundingClientRect() for this, as will …

Expanding Grid Item Animation

Nice implementation of a master-detail view, inspired upon the Surf Project Dribble Shot by Filip Slováček (pictured above). You can see this kind of animations – where elements are reused and moved from one viewstate to the other – in quite a few mobile apps nowadays (take the App Store App on iOS11 for example). …

Opera 46 and Chrome 59 now support APNG (Animated PNG)

This part of the Opera 46 release notes got me very excited: Opera now supports animated PNG, or APNG for short. APNG is a file format that works similarly to GIF. The difference is that APNG is smaller and supports both 24-bit images and 8-bit transparency. Ever since APNG landed in Firefox (10 years ago …

Smooth SVG Path Morphing with flubber

The goal of this library is to provide a best-guess interpolation for any two arbitrary shapes (or collections of shapes) that results in a reasonably smooth animation, without overthinking it. Installation per npm: npm install flubber Note that flubber only calculates the interpolated data: import { interpolate } from “flubber”; const triangle = “M1,1 L2,1 …

The success to the animations in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”

As the author calls it: “the fundamentals of hybridizing animation with live action film”. Connected eye lines Physical Interactions with the Environment Light & Shadow Accuracy … always take the chance to “Bump The Lamp” 🙂 (via The Verge)

Animating vectors in Android with AnimatedVectorDrawable

Seeing Lottie in action, I was reminded of Android’s AnimatedVectorDrawable which also allows one to do vector based animations. This class animates properties of a VectorDrawable with animations defined using ObjectAnimator or AnimatorSet. If you’re familiar with SVG, the AnimatedVectorDrawable XML contents will look familiar. The “Endless Pin Jump” animation (pictured above) for example is …

Easily add high-quality animation to any native app with Lottie

By the folks at AirBnB: Lottie is an iOS, Android, and React Native library that renders After Effects animations in real time, allowing apps to use animations as easily as they use static images. Lottie uses a JSON file – generated by the BodyMovin plugin for After Effects as its source, and then renders it …