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by another_kel 1294 days ago
If you want a course and are willing to pay for it I can recommend School of Motion — https://www.schoolofmotion.com/courses/after-effects-kicksta... (did not take this one, I took more advanced stuff and it was good). Or just like in SE a good way to learn is to choose what you want to make and then watch tutorials on youtube about that specific topic.

> I always wanted to use lottie, but never really dived into 2d animations.

However, as a person who worked as a motion designer for several years, I must say that creating good animations, especially for lotties limited toolset is not a technical problem, but an artistic one. Making animation feel good is hard and takes a lot of practice. Even more for character animation.
1 comments
klabb3 1294 days ago
Hijacking thread. Are there any alternatives to AE for those of us that want to animate and export to Lottie but also suffer physical repulsion to Adobe? Is there any serious competition? Lightweight and FOSS are on the wishlist..
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aceazzameen 1294 days ago
It's been a while since I've played with it, but there's also Expressive Animator. I think it used to be FOSS, but isn't anymore. It looks like it has a monthly subscription for Pro now (Lottie exports). About the same price as Adobe, which is a shame. https://www.expressivesuite.com/expressive-animator/
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calstephens98 1294 days ago
Hah I have the same question! I've been working on Lottie for over a year, but I've never used After Effects before and don't have it installed. My life would sure be a bit easier if there was a nice lightweight tool for creating and modifying Lottie animations. One useful tool is the lottiefiles.com editor, but its really barebones and only lets you modify colors of layers in existing animations.
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another_kel 1294 days ago
Serious competition is the opposite of lightweight and FOSS to be fair.

The most powerful AE competitor(in 2d animation) I've seen is Cavalry. It targets professional motion designers, has neat procedural animation toolset and can export to lottie.

https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/

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boriscal 1294 days ago
I've been on the waitlist for a while now, but this might be what you're looking for: https://lottielab.com
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aceazzameen 1294 days ago
Searching around and I also found this: https://www.fable.app/
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