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Make a Lottie animation

Design it as layers, ship it as JSON

Lottie plays a vector animation natively in a browser or an app, which is why designers reach for it for icons, loaders and onboarding. Premation writes bodymovin JSON from shape layers and transform tracks, and reads a Lottie back in as layers you can edit.

Download Premation

Free · AGPL-3.0-only · macOS & Windows

The panel that does it

Composition (Mark)Pen · G
Trim 072% · 6 copies @ 60° · round 18px

The editor’s own panel, rebuilt on its chrome. It works: drag, toggle, queue.

How to do it

  1. 01

    Build it from shape layers

    The pen, shape and pencil tools make vector paths; import an SVG to start from existing artwork. Keep it vector: raster images and effects do not travel in Lottie.

  2. 02

    Animate with transforms and operators

    Position, scale, rotation, opacity and path keyframes all export. Trim Paths and Repeater do too, which covers most icon and loader motion.

  3. 03

    Check the export preview

    The Export panel's Data category has Lottie. The preview scrubs the file that will be written, so anything missing is visible before you save.

  4. 04

    Export and drop it in

    One JSON file, played by lottie-web, lottie-ios or lottie-android. The file names layers as you did, so a developer can target them.

Questions

Can I export text to Lottie?
Not as live text: text layers and text animators have no Lottie representation and do not survive the round trip. Build a Lottie-bound piece from shape layers.
Does Premation open dotLottie?
It imports bodymovin .json. A .lottie file is a package around the same JSON; export the .json from your Lottie tool and import that.
Will effects show up?
No. Lottie has no effect model, so blurs, glows and colour corrections are dropped on export. The preview shows exactly what survives.