Optimization of an Extrudalized is an important concept that we must go over. If you are intending for your animation to be used on the web - you would use the Lottie optimization process. While if you intend to use the animation in an iOS or Android app, you would need to Bake the animation (convert expressions to keyframes) - baking is not an optimization process - it does not decrease animation size and will be discussed in a separate chapter. Optimization can be time consuming but, it is automated by Extrudalizer script. The optimization process, depending on your animation, can save anywhere from 10% to 50% of the Lottie size. That being said, there are several caveats that need to be taken into account.

<aside> ❗ IMPORTANT As all other functions, optimization is of course undoable, but nevertheless before using it, take a moment to save or backup of your animation. The optimization process removes expressions and as a result the layer controller used for animation and customization will break. Additionally the Optimization process will remove shapes that are not visible in your animation, so if you will decide to change the animation after optimization, it might not work as expected. This does not affect properties that you have animated.

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Once you have customized and animation the Extrudalized shape(s) to you satisfaction, go ahead and click on the Lottie button in the Post-Extrudalize section of the UI. This will open a dialog where you can select “step” value.

Step Value is a term used to indicate how often should the optimization process read the property values for the purposes of optimization. Essentially, step value of 1 means every frame will be checked for changes while step value of 10 means every 10th frame will be checked.

What this means is that an optimization process with the step value of 1 will take ten times longer than the process made with step value of 10 . The corollary of that is the accuracy - the step value of 1 process is very accurate - and will not miss any minute changes, while the faster process can miss changes in values if they would fall within a ten frame gap.

Once you click Optimize Lottie button the process will begin - you can track it one of two ways. The progress bar in the Main UI of the script will indicate the progress of the process. Additionally, if you would like to see a more accurate progress you can open the Info panel in After effects (Window > Info , or CMD/CTRL + 2 shortcut) there you will see the individual properties being processed by Extrudalizer optimization process.

The Optimization process will find all layers that have been Extrudalized in the composition and will process them in order. After each Extrudalized layer is processed it will display a small report, informing you of the number of expressions and faces (shapes) removed by the process. Once you click OK on the report, the process will continue to the next Extrudalized layer.