Quick and Simple Character Animation with Principle app
After posting my first character animation to Dribbble, a few people wanted to know how I used Principle to create the animation. If you’re not familiar with Principle, it’s an easy way to create animated and interactive user interface designs; it also turns out to be an easy way to animate almost anything (not just interfaces).
Animating Your First Character
First, we need to create a vector character in Sketch. You can use my example (along with the principle example), if you download the assets attached here: https://dribbble.com/shots/2780135-Quick-and-Simple-Character-Animation-with-Principle-app
Once you have your character laid out (I’m using sketch), make sure to group objects together so you can easily move them around in Principle (you can also group them in Principle if you choose). In this example, I’ve grouped the left/right arm, left/right leg, body, ground shadow, and flag. We’ll be moving them in Principle to create our animation.
Once your character is done and grouped in Sketch, open Principle and choose “Import”. This will import the artboard of your character from Sketch. Once imported, you’ll have a new artboard inside of Principle.
Select the artboard and duplicate it 4 times. Connect each art board to the next and the last artboard to the first using “Auto”. This is what creates the animation. Each layer on each artboard will animate to the same layer name on the next artboard.
Once all artboards are connected, select the arms, legs, body, and other grouped elements you’d like to move on artboard 2 and 4. In the example below, you can see how the 1st and 3rd artboards are the same and the 1st and 4th have slightly different positioning. This create a seamless loop. You could do only 2 artboards if you wanted an even simpler animation, but we’re going for gold here. :)
That’s it! Now, lets record the animation.
Recording our animation
Principle has a build in record tool. However over the animation preview, loops the animation. Unfortunately, Principle doesn’t have a simple way to start and stop the animation at exact times, so it’s difficult to record a perfect looping animation. The way, I’ve done it for now is to record to a gif one full animation cycle. Then, I import the gif into photoshop (or some other gif editing software) and remove frames so that the last frame is equal to the first. Re-save your gif and you’ll have a perfect loop!
Where to go from here?
This is an example of a quick and simple animation. I’m sure adding more frames, as well as carefully aligning and moving character parts could really bring this more to life. Principle offers a variety of options for animating and this only covered the most basic. If you create your own characters, please let me know in the comments — I’d love to see them!
We’re Hiring
If you happen to love Design + UX, we’re hiring a UX/UI Design lead at Workpop. Feel free to reach out and/or check out the position here: https://angel.co/workpop/jobs/47760-ui-ux-designer?utm_source=profile_module_job_listing
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