From the course: After Effects for Photography

Repeat patterns with Motion Tile

From the course: After Effects for Photography

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Repeat patterns with Motion Tile

- [Chris] The Motion Tile effect lets you create a repeating pattern from a photo and includes options for setting vertical and horizontal offsets to the pattern. And so to explore this effect, let's go to the File menu inside of a new After Effects project, come down to Import, choose File, and then locate the sunflower.png file that's located in folder one of the chapter three folder of the exercise files. So once you find this, select it. Don't click on the Create Composition option. Choose open. And then, inside of the Project panel inside of After Effects, select the sunflower.png file and note the dimensions. This is 1500 pixels by 1500 pixels. So what we're going to do now is create our own composition and we're going to make it double the size. So go to the Composition menu and choose New Composition. Or you can click this button here in the center Composition panel. Either way, inside of the Composition area, let's name this sunflower pattern. And for the width, let's set this to 3000, and then the same for the height, 3000 pixels. Square Pixels, background, we'll leave it at black. Let's click OK. And we now have a composition that's twice the size of the sunflower.png file. So now let's select the PNG file, let's drag and drop it and put it right in the center of the composition, and it should snap into place. And so now to fill our entire composition with the sunflower photo, let's come over to the Effects & Presets. Let's come in here and search for motion tile. So I'll type in motion, then click away. Under Stylize, let's find the Motion Tile effect. Let's drag and drop this on top of the sunflower PNG file. And now over here in the Effects & Presets, let's come in here and take a look at some of these settings. And so first, we'll take a look at the tile width. If we come in here and change this from the default of 100% and scrub this down, you'll notice that as this gets smaller, or less wide, we can see that the image is tiling inside of the main area. So let's come in here and set this down to 50. Hit tab. For the height, let's set this to 50%. I'll press return. And so now we have the original sunflower showing at 50% of its original size, and since it's motion tiling inside of its original tiling area, we can see all of the replications here. So if we come down in the effect controls down to the Output Width, the Output Width defaults to the size of the original PNG file. However, since we're repeating this, we can come in here and change the output width. So if I come in here and just drag this as we make this wider, you'll see that we get more replications or tiles of that artwork. So let's come in here and set this to 200%, hit a tab, let's set 200% for the Output Height. We'll hit tab again, and so basically we now have our original tile, or the original PNG file with the output width and height set to 200%, it's bringing this out to the entire width of our composition, which again, was twice the size of the original PNG. So now let's come down here and take a look at the Phase option. If we come down here and click on the Phase option and drag this, what this does is offsets every other column. We can do this either in a positive or a negative degree setting. And if we come down here and check the box for Horizontal Phase Shift, this will effect every other row instead of every other column. So what I'm going to do is uncheck Horizontal Phase Shift and let's come in here and set the Phase Shift degree to 180 degrees. And that will give us an even amount of offset for each column. So with Motion Tile you can create a repeating pattern at any size, all from the same photograph. And the original photo does not have to be transparent. So try this technique out on any of your photographs to see what kind of patterns you can create with your own images.

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