How do layers work in Lottie Creator?

Layers are a core part of building animations in Lottie Creator. They let you control and animate parts of your project individually, which gives you flexibility and makes complex animations easier to manage.

Why use layers?

Let’s say you’re animating a character. You can create separate layers for the head, body, arms, and legs. This setup makes it easy to animate each part on its own, or all together, depending on what you need.

Parent and child layers

Layers can be grouped into a parent-child structure. A parent layer can hold one or more child layers. When you move, scale, or rotate the parent, the child layers follow automatically. This setup is helpful when animating a group of elements at once.

For instance, if all parts of a character are under one parent layer, scaling that parent will scale the entire character, including its child layers.

How to manipulate objects with layers

You can select any layer and adjust its position, rotation, scale, or other properties. This directly changes how the object looks or behaves in your animation.

Want your object to slide, spin, or grow? Just tweak the right properties on its layer.

Appearance and path layers

There are two special types of layers you might use:

• Appearance layers let you change color, opacity, and other visual properties
• Path layers help you animate objects along specific motion paths

You can use them together to build dynamic animations. For example, you could have an object follow a curve while gradually changing color or fading in and out.

Updated July 17, 2025 05:34