Great questions! About the first one. Yes, the last animation could be made on any other tool. On the easy way, you could just smart animate all of it on Figma, although the output would be a heavier JSON file. Creator is powerful enough to give you an optimized JSON but since it lacks parenting (which is a feature I’m using on pretty much every element, linking them to the body movements) it might take longer to craft a natural movement of the unicorn stretch.

There are a lot of supported an non supported effects that Lottie might read according the platform you are planing to publish your animations. Here is the full list of supported features:

https://airbnb.io/lottie/#/supported-features

Normal mask effects are supported and rendered properly across all technologies. Formulas like expressions, as today March 2024, are only supported on Web. Both can be exported any time, but depending on your project technology, you might need to solve animations without certain effects. For me, After Effects gives more flexibility and cleaner output. It’s true that is not a dedicated Lottie platform since is more used for heavy animation and post-production effects, but today tools like Creator or Lottielab are still low on features needed for complex effects, but these tools are also growing quickly, and more and more features as added each month, so maybe in the near future we can hop directly to these dedicated tools, regardless of our desired motion complexity.