Gone are the days when animation was limited to films. The likes of DreamWorks, Pixar, and Disney are not the only ones using animation today. Animation is just as crucial in the UI/UX space. Hence its global market size reached $391 billion.
With respect to user interface design for mobile or web applications, animation can make an app more interactive and engaging.
However, accomplishing interactivity requires the use of a tool that supports this feature.
Rive is one such animation tool. Part of the reason it works so seamlessly for app design is that it allows development and design teams to work together seamlessly.
Plus, the Rive Bones feature facilitates the creation of skeletal animations to impart realism to characters and objects. Here’s an in-depth guide about the Rive app and its benefits for design teams.
What is Rive?
Previously known as Flare, Rive is an interactive animation and design tool to create vector-based animations for interactive platforms, including web and mobile. The combination of code and art allows designers and developers to create interactive experiences for the end user.
What kind of animations can you make with Rive?
Designers can use Rive to make a wide range of animations, including transitions, interactive buttons, characters, UI interactions, and 2D vector animations. The Rive platform also supports animations for games, websites, apps, and more.
What is the Rive State Machine?
The designer-to-developer hand-off doesn’t have to be complicated anymore due to the Rive State Machine. Since the State Machine acts as a bridge between both parties, it makes iteration easy.
Designers who want to mix several animations in the same state can use the Blend State. It allows them to create interesting animations, like facial expressions on characters. In app design, the Blend State creates interactive experiences like a loading bar or a pull-to-refresh animation.
Rive vs. After Effects and Lottie
There’s no denying that After Effects is one of the best software out there, especially for motion graphics. That said, it’s tradition-bound and complex to learn. Moreover, After Effects is geared more toward designers rather than developers.
On the other hand, Rive brings developers and designers on the same page. Rive animations are also lightweight and vector-based. So, they have smaller sizes than the pixel-based animations of After Effects.
As for Lottie, it has its limitations too. It works with After Effects and doesn’t support screen transitions. You can also not create advanced light effects in Lottie.
In comparison to Lottie, Rive animations are more interactive. They make a great addition to any website or platform where you need the end user to engage with your offering. If you want to integrate the base designs from Lottie into Rive, import the file as JSON.
How Rive makes animations easier for motion designers
What sets Rive apart from traditional design tools is that it’s built to mimic a game engine. The platform’s behavior itself is pretty interactive, allowing designers to bring the same level of interactivity to their work.
Here are some notable animation features of Rive:
- Path trimming: You don’t have to animate the whole vector. Instead, you can simply animate a specific portion.
- Skeletal animation: By adding bones, you can animate objects and characters to make them look more ”organic.” We talk more about Rive Bones later.
- Animation mixing: You can mix different animations for added interactivity.
Rive caters to UI designers by enabling the export of animations as code. The developers can then integrate these animations into mobile and web projects.
Thanks to the end-to-end pipeline, the designers can see exactly how their designs will look in the final product. It’s a great way to ensure that the animations look how intended.
Developers can also manipulate Rive animations in real-time. It lets them create dynamic user experiences for higher engagement.
Some designers like to work with multiple tools since they want specific features of each. Rive supports imports from Lottie and Figma. You can import a Lottie JSON file in Rive or copy a file as SVG in Figma and paste it in Rive.
Collaboration and communication in Rive
Design becomes simpler and more comprehensive when you can collaborate with relevant teams. Rive lets you interact with team members in real time so that you can get valuable feedback while working and share new ideas.
Rive also has a vibrant community of designers. You can share your ideas for feedback or take inspiration from designs shared in the community forum. Beginners can also build on other creators’ work to practice.
What is Rive Bones?
Bones is a feature in the Rive app that lets designers create skeletons for their graphics. It’s a natural and intuitive way to animate connected parts like a tree branch or an arm on a character.
Bones is similar to a digital skeleton or armature that brings structure to a character. The bones are attached to the character’s body and move along with it, creating organic movements.
How Rive Bones can be used
Bones has plenty of use cases. Here are some of them.
Character animations
The most common use for Rive Bones is character animation. You can create a bone structure for your characters. Each bone would represent a different body part, such as the leg or arm.
Then, you attach your character’s artwork to its skeletal structure. When you manipulate the bones, the character will move too. The underlying bones give the character real-looking movements.
Organic movements and deformations
Speaking of movements, Rive Bones is excellent for representing organic movements. By adding bones to characters, designers can make their actions more lifelike.
Bones also allows deformation through binding. It’s a technique in which you deform a section of a shape, like a character, with one bone and the other part with another bone.
Suppose your brand’s logo is an animated cowboy. You can ”deform” its body by using more than one bone. This way, when you move the bone controlling the hat, the character’s legs don’t move.
You can also use Constraints to control an object through another. Let’s say your character is holding a flashlight. When you set a Constraint, the character’s arm will also move with the flashlight. That helps make the movement seem more realistic.
Controlled animations
Controlled animations are an integral part of an interactive app or website. After all, you want the users to engage with the platform.
Rive Bones lets designers manipulate bones based on the end user’s input. For example, if the user taps a button, the character could move its arm in response.
Efficient iteration
Redrawing characters or objects from scratch every time there needs to be a change is time-consuming and downright annoying. Rive Bones eliminates the need for designers to do this.
Instead, you can fine-tune animations without recreating or redrawing them. The same is true for animation sequences too.
Suppose you’ve created an animation sequence showing a new user how to add their card to a spending tracking app. You want to change something in one of the animations, such as the character’s hand gestures or head movements. Rive Bones lets you do this easily.
Complex transformations
The traditional frame-by-frame animation techniques often make it challenging to create complex animations and transformations. Rive Bones can handle these transformations with ease, allowing dynamic animations.
Interactive user experiences
Interactivity doesn’t have to be for games alone. You can also introduce interactive elements in your apps and websites. Or you can simply gamify your apps.
For example, if you’re creating a food delivery app, gamify the sign-up process. Users win coins for every step they finish. When they place the first order, they pass the first round.
After that, you can have challenges and tournaments like ordering five times on the weekend in a month or making three orders above $50. For every challenge the user passes, they get rewards. Such an interactive experience can significantly enhance user engagement and loyalty.
Rive Bones lets designers create these interactive experiences in any interactive project. You can add triggers and conditions, set actions for each trigger, animate objects, control sound effects, and do a lot more.
How we use Rive Bones at VeryCreatives
At VeryCreatives, we believe in creating platforms that ”deliver the perfect user experience” because we believe it’s integral to revenue generation for a business. Rive Bones helps us do that.
Our design team has a few tricks up its sleeves, using Rive Bones to bring realism and functionality to UI animations and designs. We use Rive Bones and other features to create animations for user onboarding, app tutorials, and interactive transitions.
What’s the result? Fun and engaging animations that will keep users on your web or mobile platform for a longer time than they would if you only showed them a boring white screen with blocks of text.
Amp up product design with Rive
The Harvard Business Review emphasizes the importance of interactive digital design because there’s an abundance of information today. Users have way too many options. A good way to make them choose your offering is to drive user engagement.
When it comes to SaaS product design, you need a partner that understands the importance of user engagement and interactivity. At VeryCreatives, we keep both these things at the crux of our design process.
Rive Bones is one of the many tools we use to incorporate interactivity into our designs. In doing so, our aim is to get the user to engage with your product as much as possible.
Want to learn what else we can do for your SaaS project? Get in touch with us today.
