TileEngine

About this plugin

Apply TileEngine to a layer from Effect > Stylize and the layer becomes one tile of an endless pattern. Shift Center To slides it and wraps it around, like After Effects' Offset, and Expand Right, Left, Down and Up grow the layer so the tiles fill the space around it, like RepeTile. Lay the tiles as they are, mirrored across, down or both ways, turned in a checker or a rosette, or flipped and turned at random. Scale them, space them apart or overlap them, offset the rows or the columns like bricks, and repeat them both ways or in one row or column. Seam Feather blends neighbouring tiles across their seams with a cross-fade, a mirror blend or a fade-out, and Seam Roughness lets the seams wander instead of running straight. Scroll Speed X and Y move the pattern, and Loop rounds the motion so it comes back exactly after the time you set. TileEngine renders on the GPU (CUDA on NVIDIA, OpenCL on AMD and Intel) or on the CPU. Free, for After Effects on Windows: unzip it, copy TileEngine.aex into After Effects' Plug-ins folder and restart After Effects.

What it does

• Ten tiling modes: repeat, mirror horizontal, vertical or both, checker turned 180° or 90° either way, rosette, random flip and random rotate
• Shift Center To slides the layer and wraps it around, like Offset
• Expand Right, Left, Down and Up fill the space around the layer, like RepeTile
• Tile scale, or separate width and height, and spacing that can overlap the tiles
• Brick offset along the rows or the columns
• Repeat both ways, or in one row or one column
• Seam feather as a cross-fade, a mirror blend or a fade-out
• Seam roughness: the seams wander, at the size you set
• Scroll speed X and Y, with loops that come back exactly
• Random seed for the random modes and the rough seams
• Outer feather for the expanded edges, and a blend with the original
• Bicubic, bilinear or nearest sampling, with mipmaps for small tiles
• Show Tile Borders outlines the tiles and tints the blend zones
• GPU rendering with CUDA (NVIDIA) and OpenCL (AMD, Intel), or the CPU