Smooth Tiler plug-in
Smooth Tiler seamlessly tiles images that were not designed to be seamlessly titled. It does this by blending opposite edges together as the image is tiled. This creates a soft blend between the two edges and can give the appearance of a smooth transition.
This effect works best on textures and abstract images like waves and clouds, and is a great way of creating backgrounds or setting up texture maps. If you have two hard-edged images, let's say of a house and a tree, the image content won't blend but Smooth Tiler will create a smooth transition between the image edges.
Smooth Tiler plug-in.
Tiled Layer pop-up
Selects the image that will be tiled. You can use any layer in the After Effects Timeline. Vector files and files with alphas don't usually have straight hard edges so you may get unexpected results when using them.
Uniform Blend Amount checkbox
When turned off, this checkbox lets you apply different Blend Amount settings for the top/bottom and right/left. Turned on by default, which means the same Blend Amount is always applied.
Blend Amount
A key parameter for Smooth Tiler which specifies the width of the area that will be blended. It is the borders of this area that are blended, leaving the center of the image untouched.
The larger the Blend Amount, the larger the borders that you blend, and the less that will be left of the original image. At low values, most of the original image will remain and you will get a slight transition between edges, which won't look seamless. At high values ,you'll get a more blended look but less of the original image will be left.
Left to right, original photo, Blend at 35% and Blend at 80%.
Tile Arrangement pop-up
Gives two options for how the tiles are arranged.
Left to right, original photo, Repeat and Reflect.
Tile Blend Transfer pop-up
Sets a transfer mode for the edges as they are blended. You can use any of the standard transfer modes. Difference, Add, Overlay, and Hard Light generally give some interesting effects by making the transitions lighter or darker than the main image.
Original Blend Transfer pop-up
These Transfer Modes work as transfer modes standardly do. Use the modes to composite the tiled image on top of its layer.
Composite with Original
Blends the tiled image with the underlying image that it’s been applied to. Use the Original Blend Transfer pop-up to determine how they blend.
Fading Function pop-up
Sets how the edges blend when they are animated. Animating from 100 to 0 in a linear fashion can result in jerky animations. If you use After Effects' Easy Ease function and gradually ease out of 100 and ease in to 0 the animation looks smoother. This is essentially what Smooth Fade does and it usually gives a nicer result.
There are two options:
Anti-Aliasing pop-up
When Smooth Tiler scales images up or down, those images are resampled, which typically results in a softening or blurring of the image. This pop-up applies different anti-aliasing methods that reduce the amount of softening. You must have the layer set to Best Quality to see the effects of this setting.
There are five Anti-Aliasing options:
Cropping Controls group
The Cropping Controls group lets you crop the image that is tiling. Its effect is similar to creating a rectangular mask to crop the image.
Use Crop checkbox
To turn on the cropping controls, select the Use Crop checkbox. This will activate the other parameters.
Preview Mode pop-up
Gives two ways to adjust the Cropping controls.
Top Left Corner, Bottom Right Corner
Sets the top left and bottom right points of the crop area. These controls are activated by choosing Preview Mode> Crop Preview Mode.
Border Controls group
The Border Controls group applies a border around the tiles. This is typically most effective when you do NOT have a Blend Amount set, since the borders are calculated as part of the tile and blending them can give unexpected or very soft-looking results.
Border Controls> Border Type pop-up
Gives four variations of borders to choose from.
Left to right, Solid Color and Edge Pixels.
Left to right, Stretched Image and Tiled Image.
Border Controls> Border Width, Border Height
Sets how thick the border will be. If you choose to blend the border, its thickness will affect how the tiles are created. For tiling purposes, the border is added on to the image size.
Border Controls> Border Color
Sets the color of the border.
Transform Controls group
Transform Controls are the second key parameter for Smooth Tiler. This is where you will set up the size of your tile.
Transform Controls> X Scale, Y Scale
Set the size of the tile as a percentage of the original image. You can scale the original image up or down though usually you will scale it down. You can scale X and Y together or separately, which gives a lot of options for stretching the tiles.
Blend Amount always stays relative to the tile size, so shrinking or enlarging the tile doesn't require changing Blend Amount as well.
NOTE: You can't tile an image that is scaled larger than the layer that Smooth Tiler is applied to.
Left to right, X/Y Scale at 10 and 50.
Transform Controls> X Offset, Y Offset
Lets you move the tiles right/left or up/down. Since Smooth Tiler creates seamless tiles, you can reposition the tiles almost infinitely. The tiles will always repeat, so you never have to worry about running out of tiles or hitting the image edge.
Transform Controls> Use Rotate checkbox
Turn this on to make the Rotation control active. Turning this off is the equivalent of setting Rotation to 0.
Transform Controls> Rotation
Rotates the entire grid of images. NOTE: Smooth Tiler does not rotate individual tiles.