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Lottie 4.0 for iOS: new render engine with significant performance improvements

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Re: Lottie 4.0 for iOS: new render engine with significant performance improvements

#51

Post by calstephens98 »

klabb3 wrote: post #50
another_kel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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..

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.

Re: Lottie 4.0 for iOS: new render engine with significant performance improvements

#52

Post by aceazzameen »

klabb3 wrote: post #50
another_kel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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..

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/

Re: Lottie 4.0 for iOS: new render engine with significant performance improvements

#53

Post by codetrotter »

dang wrote: post #14

Related: Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634114 - Dec 2021 (111 comments) Lottie for Android, iOS, React Native, and Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17209832 - June 2018 (18 comments) Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13543927 - Feb 2017 (97 comments) Others?

The first of those links is the OP itself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33886673

Re: Lottie 4.0 for iOS: new render engine with significant performance improvements

#54

Post by dang »

codetrotter wrote: post #53
dang wrote: post #14

Related: Lottie – Use after effects animations in web and native apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634114 - Dec 2021 (111 comments) Lottie for Android, iOS, React Native, and Web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17209832 - June 2018 (18 comments) Introducing Lottie: Airbnb's tool for adding animations to native apps - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13543927 - Feb 2017 (97 comments) Others?

The first of those links is the OP itself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33886673

Doh! Removed. Thanks.

Re: Lottie 4.0 for iOS: new render engine with significant performance improvements

#55

Post by forrestthewoods »

twobitshifter wrote: post #3

Crazy to me that animations would have been done on the main thread but that showed how far you can get with kiss. The performance improvement they’re showing is great -17% CPU to display a loading animation down to 0. Before the animation could be interfering with the loading!

> The performance improvement they’re showing is great -17% CPU to display a loading animation down to 0.

It’s not reducing the device CPU cost to zero. It’s moving it to a different process that isn’t captured in the profile. Big difference.

Not blocking the main thread is a clear win though. I’m mildly surprised the work isn’t done in an in-process background thread. But I don’t know that type of detail for iOS.

Re: Lottie 4.0 for iOS: new render engine with significant performance improvements

#57

Post by TillE »

grishka wrote: post #10
CamelRocketFish wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you on iOS Developer? Anything related to UI is always suggested to be done on the main thread by Apple.

It's not isolated to iOS in particular — it's the case in every single GUI framework I've ever dealt with. Android for example would throw an exception if you try touching the views from another thread.

It's a common pattern whenever you don't want the overhead of locks on every single function call. If you're doing anything CPU-intensive, you do it in another thread, synchronize and make API calls in the main thread.

I don't know how deeply animations are tied to the OS API, though.

Re: Lottie 4.0 for iOS: new render engine with significant performance improvements

#58

Post by dagmx »

gfxgirl wrote: post #13

> These issues are inherent limitations of using a main-thread-bound rendering architecture. sorry but bullshit! Sure, multi-threaded rendering can give faster results but the apps AirBnB is making could have easily rendered at 60hz with single threaded software rendering in flash in 1998! I can only guess that too much abstraction throughout the systems has turned into death by 1000 cuts and their solution, instead…

You’re ignoring the OS doing other things as well before letting you draw to the screen.

This isn’t a video game where they’re direct drawing to a graphics context with exclusive use of the resources. They’re also setting up native widgets in the background, coordinating data downloads etc..

Unlike a video game where you control the rendering and scheduling to a greater degree, here they’re beholden to when the OS deems it ready to redraw or scheduling of background processes that may move their task to a lower priority.

Yes you can go fast if you don’t factor in the rest of the system, but they designed Lottie to play well within a retained mode UI setup, which has inherent overhead.

Re: Lottie 4.0 for iOS: new render engine with significant performance improvements

#59

Post by dagmx »

dlivingston wrote: post #46
gfxgirl wrote: post #13

> These issues are inherent limitations of using a main-thread-bound rendering architecture. sorry but bullshit! Sure, multi-threaded rendering can give faster results but the apps AirBnB is making could have easily rendered at 60hz with single threaded software rendering in flash in 1998! I can only guess that too much abstraction throughout the systems has turned into death by 1000 cuts and their solution, instead…

This makes me wonder: are immediate-mode GUIs (like Dear ImGui) subject to stuttering and frame-drops under compute-heavy workloads?

Yes they are. They’re beholden to whatever your event loop is.

they’re being told when to draw (hence the immediate), so if you suddenly have computation on the same thread that’s blocking OR your thread gets deprioritized , you’ll get stutters.

Immediate mode UIs aren’t very suitable for mobile use though. They don’t have great consideration for battery efficiency, unless you introduce a retained backing of some kind. They’re also not great for accessibility, though that’s mostly just because they’re not native.

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