Chapter 3 – The Patterns
Now, to the patterns. Following the principles above and inspired by existing models, the team has generated over 30 genuine and fully procedural camouflage patterns. If you are an expert of the genre, you know that actual camouflage patterns are very technical products engineered to obtain the optimum optical concealment. For this collection, we chose to focus mainly on the graphic appearance to outline 6 distinctive styles.
Each pattern from the collection includes several parameters for customization:
First, and probably the most important: colors! Our goal here was to provide for each motif the freedom to change each color independently. You can thus tweak up to 5 colors in a single pattern to create custom combinations. In addition, you can choose to disable the background color of the pattern in order to reveal the base material color information underneath.
The roughness parameter allows you to change the glossiness level of the pattern from the base color. This lets you simulate selective printing effects, such as for example a PCV printing that would make the printed areas shinier than the rest of the material.
The scale parameter allows you to vary the overall scale of the shapes, from small to large, in order to adapt the proportion of the motif to the base material. It therefore helps vary the density of the pattern on the map.
Finally, the color fading option helps you create a subtler blending of the printed pattern with the substrate by creating a soft fading effect to the shapes.
Brushstrokes are directly extracted from paintbrushes, in the manner of first artists and theater decorators who hand-painted on canvas in the early 20th century. This style refers to the painted strokes of the large brushes, which create wide swathes of color, usually with thinner trails leading off where the strokes began.
The models of flecks follow the principles of perceptual psychology. It is a speckle pattern in which up to six colors interact to provide sufficient visual disturbance through dithering. More precisely, it causes the wearer’s contours to be broken and integrated into his environment . The pattern uses spots to eliminate the hard boundaries between different colors of varying sizes scattered in a seemingly random arrangement.
The chunks or splinter pattern consists of a disruptive pattern of hard-edged polygons with sharp angles between the colored patches to create an effective camouflage pattern in temperate forests and plains.
The tigerstripe or lizard is a group of camouflage patterns designed to blend into jungle-like environments. It takes its name from its resemblance to the stripes of a tiger: narrow stripes that resemble brushstrokes, and wider black brushstrokes printed on a lighter shade. The brushstrokes interlock rather than overlap.
The multicam design takes advantage of the way the eye and the brain work. Only a very small part of the eye perceives color, shape and volume. It relies heavily on the brain to complement what is left out to blend everything into the environment. The variety of shapes and sizes work hand in hand with a unique color profile to disrupt the wearer’s visual trace.
The confusion pattern produces several layers of perceptible depth from a limited quantity of colors arranged in a set of specifically configured shapes and shades.
Digital camouflage allows natural-looking patterns to be obtained at more varied distances, such as pointillism; they use computers and algorithms to achieve this ‘scale variance’ advantage. The theory behind micro-patterns is that large color patches with sharp contours are easier to see, while ‘blurring’ or ‘dithering’ the edges of colored patches makes the contours harder to discern.
In common usage, however, the term digital has come to refer to any camouflage design that incorporates pixels rather than organic shapes to create the design. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the ‘Minecraft’ aspect of pixelated camos is actually more effective than previous designs that sought to imitate nature.
The actual pixelated military patterns were introduced in early 2000s and were fully computer generated. Similarly, we fully relied on Substance Designer’s procedural approach to design our generic digital patterns.