Lottie

[hansmbakker]

Nice tool! Can animations created in Theatre.js also be exported as Lottie animations so that they can be used in apps?

[vko-online]

that would be killer feature for mobile devs

[AriaMinaei]

I wonder what workflow you're envisioning with Lottie exports. Would you use Theatre.js animations both for web and for mobile for example?

Edit: For a less formal discussion on this topic, feel free to join this thread on Discord.

[hansmbakker]

Lottie can be used in web, mobile and desktop apps. Both for micro-interactions and small explainer / filler animations.

Lottie animations can currently be created by Adobe software, but I'm looking for 2D animation software that I can use instead.

[AriaMinaei]

Thanks @hansmbakker. I took some time to think about this.

Native app support could have different forms, some of which may use Lottie.

• One way it could work is to have, say, a Figma plugin plus Theatre extension that exports to Lottie. So the user would design the stills in Figma, and then use Theatre to animate them, and automatically get a Lottie export for native apps. That's one way to do it.
• Another way would be to code the stills in React/Vue/etc, and have Theatre be the animating+tweaking step. This is how the react-three-fiber extension works.

I could think of other ways as well.

Luckily it's easy to experiment on theses with Theatre extensions¹ so we don't have to include Lottie support in the core, at least for now.

For those who want to build such an extension, feel free to join the community – we'd love to help!

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1. As of now, extensions are undocumented, but I'm writing more docs soon.