How Galacean Effects Powers Billion‑User Spring Festival Animations with Real‑Time Rendering

Every year before Chinese New Year, Alipay's "Collect Fortune" event becomes a nationwide celebration, requiring immersive animations for billions of users.

What Is Galacean Effects?

Galacean Effects is an online animation solution co‑created by Ant Group’s Creative Design Center and Experience Technology Department, focused on mobile platforms. Designers create animations in an editor and export JSON/ZIP packages that developers can load and play without writing code, dramatically reducing implementation cost.

Key Features

What‑you‑see‑is‑what‑you‑get workflow ensures 100 % visual fidelity across platforms.

Supports Spine skeletal animation, particle effects, and transparent video, enabling rich IP‑specific animations.

Real‑time rendering capabilities such as multi‑composition playback, dynamic text, and programmable APIs allow personalized experiences for each user.

Online multi‑user collaboration lets designers and developers edit the same project simultaneously, cutting synchronization overhead.

Spine Integration Example

Galacean Effects parses and renders Spine assets, allowing detailed character motions such as blinking, arm waving, and tail swinging.

Performance Challenges and Solutions

Serving hundreds of millions of users on low‑end devices demands careful optimization. Strategies include resource compression, shader compilation parallelism, selective image formats (PNG vs WebP/AVIF), and tiered rendering (high‑end, mid‑range, cloud‑rendered low‑end). Memory usage is kept below 500 MB, typically around 400 MB.

Technical Architecture

The runtime supports H5 and native platforms, offering cross‑platform reuse, programmable extensions, and an open ecosystem that accepts Lottie, PSD, and other assets.

Impact

By eliminating the need for developers to hand‑code animations, Galacean Effects shortens development cycles, improves stability, and enables rapid delivery of high‑quality festive experiences.

Official site and GitHub links are provided for further exploration.