Lottie for Node.js

Lottie is a mobile library for Node.js that parses Adobe After Effects animations exported as json with Bodymovin and renders them natively on mobile!

For the first time, designers can create and ship beautiful animations without an engineer painstakingly recreating it by hand. They say a picture is worth 1,000 words so here are 13,000:

documentation

View documentation, FAQ, help, examples, and more at airbnb.io/lottie

Installation

# with npm
npm install lottie-nodejs

Demo

See a basic implementation here. See examples on codepen.

How it works

Here's a video tutorial explaining how to export a basic animation and load it in an html page

After Effects

• Open your AE project and select the bodymovin extension on Window > Extensions > bodymovin
• A Panel will open with a Compositions tab listing all of your Project Compositions.
• Select the composition you want to export.
• Select a Destination Folder.
• Click Render
• look for the exported json file (if you had images or AI layers on your animation, there will be an images folder with the exported files)

UseAge

You can call lottie.loadAnimation() to start an animation. It takes an object as a unique param with:

• animationData: an Object with the exported animation data. Note: If your animation contains repeaters and you plan to call loadAnimation multiple times with the same animation, please deep clone the object before passing it (see #1159 and #2151.)
• path: the relative path to the animation object. (animationData and path are mutually exclusive)
• loop: true / false / number
• autoplay: true / false it will start playing as soon as it is ready
• name: animation name for future reference
• renderer: 'svg' / 'canvas' / 'html' to set the renderer
• container: the dom element on which to render the animation

It returns the animation instance you can control with play, pause, setSpeed, etc.

lottie.loadAnimation({
  container: element, // the dom element that will contain the animation
  renderer: 'svg',
  loop: true,
  autoplay: true,
  path: 'data.json' // the path to the animation json
});

Composition Settings:

Check this wiki page for an explanation for each setting. https://github.com/airbnb/lottie-web/wiki/Composition-Settings

Preview

You can preview or take an svg snapshot of the animation to use as poster. After you render your animation, you can take a snapshot of any frame in the animation and save it to your disk. I recommend to pass the svg through an svg optimizer like https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/ and play around with their settings.

Recommendations

Files

If you have any images or AI layers that you haven't converted to shapes (I recommend that you convert them, so they get exported as vectors, right click each layer and do: "Create shapes from Vector Layers"), they will be saved to an images folder relative to the destination json folder. Beware not to overwrite an existing folder on that same location.

Performance

This is real time rendering. Although it is pretty optimized, it always helps if you keep your AE project to what is necessary More optimizations are on their way, but try not to use huge shapes in AE only to mask a small part of it. Too many nodes will also affect performance.

AE Feature Support

• The script supports precomps, shapes, solids, images, null objects, texts
• It supports masks and inverted masks. Maybe other modes will come but it has a huge performance hit.
• It supports time remapping
• The script supports shapes, rectangles, ellipses and stars.
• Expressions. Check the wiki page for more info.
• Not supported: image sequences, videos and audio are not supported
• No negative layer stretching! No idea why, but stretching a layer messes with all the data.

Development

npm install or bower install first npm start

Notes

• If you want to modify the parser or the player, there are some gulp commands that can simplify the task
• look at the great animations exported on codepen See examples on codepen.
• gzipping the animation jsons and the player have a huge reduction on the filesize. I recommend doing it if you use it for a project.

Issues

• For missing mask in Safari browser, please call lottie.setLocationHref(locationHref) before animation is generated. It usually caused by usage of base tag in html. (see above for description of setLocationHref)