How to Animate Elements When in View on Scroll with Framer Motion

Animate React Apps with Framer Motion

Will released a full-length course on Framer Motion. Check it out if you're interested:

What is Framer Motion?

Framer Motion is a declarative animation library for React. It makes adding animations to React apps feel simple, even magical. Framer Motion basically hides away CSS transitions from you. You just say what you want, and BOOM the library will handle the css details of the animation.

The heart & soul of Framer Motion is Motion components. You can turn anything HTML or SVG element into a motion component by adding motion. to the beginning of the element.

Example

<motion.div>Motion Component</motion.div>

Once an element becomes a motion component, it gets access to a bunch of new props like animate, variants and transition to name a few.

Prerequisites

You would know how to create small applications in React and use features like Hooks. You are also familiar with CSS properties like opacity, scale, and transition. While this isn't an introduction to Framer Motion from scratch. You're not expected to have any Framer Motion knowledge. You will learn Framer Motion by building with it, and I'll explain new concepts along the way.

What You'll Be Building

You'll use Framer Motion with react-intersection-observer to trigger squares and scale animation to grow bigger when they come into view.

react-intersection-observer is a React flavored version of the Intersection Observer API to tell you when an element enters or leaves the viewport.

You will not build this application from scratch the starter code is here

You can view the final demo here

Set Up

You'll start with a React app with four Square components rendered on-screen vertically.

App.js

import React from "react";import "./styles.css";function Square() {  return <div className="square"></div>;}export default function App() {  return (    <div className="App">      <h1 className="title">Scroll Down</h1>      <Square />      <Square />      <Square />      <Square />    </div>  );}

The first thing you'll do is install Framer Motion and react-intersection-observer

npm install framer-motion react-intersection-observer --save

Next, you'll bring in everything you need to create the animation.

• import motion and the useAnimation hook from Framer motion
• useEffect from React
• useInView hook from react-intersection-observer

App.js

import React, { useEffect } from "react";import { useAnimation, motion } from "framer-motion";import { useInView } from "react-intersection-observer";

Don't worry. You will get an explanation on what each one does when it's time to use them.

Creating the Animation with Variants

To create the animation, you'll use a feature of Framer Motion call Variants (not be confused with Loki variants). Variants are objects that you use to define how you want the animation to look and reference the animation by name.

App.js

const squareVariants = {  visible: { opacity: 1, scale: 4, transition: { duration: 1 } },  hidden: { opacity: 0, scale: 0 }};function Square() {---}

Here you created a variant object called squareVariants. Inside the object, you have the property visible that you passed an object as the value. When the element is visible you want it to:

• have opacity be 1
• scale to 4x it's size
• have the transition from hidden to visible to have a duration of 1 second.

And when the element is hidden you change opacity and scale to 0 so it's invisible.

Variants are dope because they free up your motion components from being overcrowded with a whole lot of props. You can put all the details of your animation in the variants object and reference it by adding the variants prop and to a motion component.

App.js

function Square() {  return (    <motion.div      variants={squareVariants}      className="square"    ></motion.div>  );}

Inside of the Square component you:

• add motion. a the div
• adding a variants prop
• set it to the squareVariants object you created

Just adding the variants prop won't do anything. Your motion components need to know when you want these animations to start and what state you want them to end up in when the animation is finished.

For this, you need to add the intial and the animate prop.

App.js

function Square() {  return (    <motion.div      animate={{ scale: 2 }}      initial="hidden"      variants={squareVariants}      className="square"    ></motion.div>  );}

Set the initial prop to "hidden" this tells Framer you want this div to have an opacity and scale of 0 (which is the value you define for hidden in the squareVariants object. ) when the pages loads. The initial prop describes what state you want the animation to begin.

The animate prop is the final state of the animation. Framer Motion automatically takes care of how the animation looks from initial to animate. The animate prop takes objects. Temporarily you'll pass in { scale:2 }. This causes Square to scale to twice its size on page loads, animate will be changed later.

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Add useAnimation and useInView to the Square Component

By default, Framer Motion runs animations once the page loads. The useAnimation hook gives you access to the helper methods start and stop to give you more control over when the animation begins and ends. You'll use the start method to set what animation gets get trigged when the element is in view.

Create a controls variable and set to useAnimation() and change the animate prop to controls.

App.js

function Square() {const controls = useAnimation();  return (    <motion.div      animate={{ scale: 2 }}      initial="hidden"      variants={squareVariants}      className="square"    ></motion.div>  );}

Next, you'll bring in the useInView hook from react-intersection-observer. Use array destructing to pull out ref and inView from useInView return.

App.js

function Square() {const controls = useAnimation();const [ref, inView] = useInView();  return (    <motion.div      animate={{ scale: 2 }}      initial="hidden"      variants={squareVariants}      className="square"    ></motion.div>  );}

The useInView hook returns an array with a ref and a Boolean inView that checks if the status of an element being in view is true or false.

Trigger Animation with useEffect

Inside of the Square component useEffect with an if statement. If inView is true set it run the controls.start() method and pass it the squareVariants property of "visible". Use controls and inView as the dependecy array. Finally, add a ref attribute to the motion.div and assign it the ref from useInView

App.js

function Square() {const controls = useAnimation();const [ref, inView] = useInView();useEffect(() => {    if (inView) {      controls.start("visible");    }  }, [controls, inView]);  return (    <motion.div      ref={ref}      animate={controls}      initial="hidden"      variants={squareVariants}      className="square"    ></motion.div>  );}

When the value of inView changes aka when the element we referenced is in view, and inView changes from false to true. It will run useEffect to trigger controls.start() to run the visible animation.

This is a look at the full code

App.js

import React, { useEffect } from "react";import { useAnimation, motion } from "framer-motion";import { useInView } from "react-intersection-observer";import "./styles.css";const squareVariants = {  visible: { opacity: 1, scale: 4, transition: { duration: 1 } },  hidden: { opacity: 0, scale: 0 }};function Square() {  const controls = useAnimation();  const [ref, inView] = useInView();  useEffect(() => {    if (inView) {      controls.start("visible");    }  }, [controls, inView]);  return (    <motion.div      ref={ref}      animate={controls}      initial="hidden"      variants={squareVariants}      className="square"    ></motion.div>  );}export default function App() {  return (    <div className="App">      <h1 className="title">Scroll Down</h1>      <Square />      <Square />      <Square />      <Square />    </div>  );}

Conclusion

The demo app should have four boxes that grow to 4x their size when they are visible on the screen. You created this with minimal tweaking of the animation properties. Framer handled the annoying parts for you.

You learned how to create motion components, create variants to clean up your code, add the initial and animate props to tell Framer Motion how you want animations to start and end. Also, you used the useAnimation hook to override Framer Motions default behavior of when the animation starts.

You also used react-intersection-observer to make it a lot easier to tell when our element is in view or not.

Next Steps

Take Will's course to get a better idea of what Framer Motion has to offer:

Resources

• useAnimation Hook
• Variants
• Motion components
• react-intersection-observer

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