Chris Schneck

If playing paintball in the woods is your thing, you undoubtedly own something in olive drab or some other easily available camouflage pattern. Camouflage has been evolving since the beginning of the predator prey relationship, with survival being its only purpose. Human adorned military camouflage and the science of visual acuity have only been around since the mid 19th century, but our big human brains have learned much.

The sole purpose of camouflage is to break up and conceal the recognizable geometric shape of an object with its surrounding environment. Camouflage makes an object difficult to detect by emulating the immediate visual background. The colouring, size and distribution of pattern elements must necessarily be in aspects pertinent to the visual system of the observer.

So literally the best camouflage is one that looks as similar as possible in all aspects to your immediate surroundings in both colour and pattern.

There are all kinds of terrains and climates with their own flora and fauna, it will be nearly impossible for you to own the perfect camouflage for every event and locale. Even if you do own a pattern that matches the surroundings that you normally play on, are you using your camouflage in such a way that it breaks up the recognizable geometric outline of the human body? Regardless of your body being covered in a sufficient visually disruptive pattern, what about your mask and marker? If anything is going to give you away while playing woodsball its going to be thundering around like a fool, the silhouette of the visor on your mask, the mask itself or the silhouette of your marker.

Movement, or lack of movement, is very much a part of effective camouflage. You’ve most likely seen pictures that demonstrate a particular camouflage patterns capabilities and there’s one thing that all these pictures have in common. The concealed subject isn’t moving! On top of a still picture not recreating the movement of a natural environment the concealed subject in the demonstration pictures is, 90% of the time, not carrying any paintball gear! As long as you remain motionless, theres less of a chance your mask or marker will give you concealed position away, but as soon as you raise your marker to take aim, or poke your head up to see whats going on, its pretty much all over.

There is one expensive solution that might be practical depending on your style of play, the ghillie suit, aka the ‘yowie suit’. This form of camouflage first made an appearance in 1916 during the second Boer War and is named after a type of tree spirit that is supposed to disguise itself in leaves and vegetation. A ghillie suit is often comprised of several pounds of jute thread, and is incredibly hot to wear. Since these suits take a considerable amount of time to manufacture, they are often also expensive. Although highly effective, the ghillie is only as capable as its wearer, again movement will give you away even if you are head to toe looking like a mossy swamp thing.

So which easily available camouflage pattern is the best? How much do I have to pay and who do I have to go to, to get the best camouflage?

It’s been my experience that as long as you are wearing a natural and abundant colour, like the very common olive drab, and you pay attention to how you move and your position in your surroundings in relation to potential objectives you’ll regularly surprise people. Stay low, move cautiously and with intent, crawl often as people aren’t expecting that. Don’t second guess yourself, once you’ve decided to move, commit to the movement. Use brush as cover, as long as there is 2 or 3 inches of foliage between you and a potential hotspot you are less likely to be seen, natural cover is the best!

Sound is also an integral part to camouflage, shut the hell up and remember to practice and use your hand signals or invest in some radios and headset / mic combos. Combat boots are nice, I wear them, but running shoes are quieter and should be considered as an alternative.

In the end the camouflage is only as good as the person wearing it, very much like a paintball marker is only as good as the person operating it.

I don’t play paintball for a living, I’m a programmer by trade. When I get bored I tend to write little programs that are fun to me, sometimes are very handy, but really aren’t much use to anyone else. On one such day that I was bored, but inspired by copious amounts of coffee, I wrote something that I’ve just now named the C.R.D.C.G

The Custom Random Digitalesque Camouflage Generator or C.R.D.C.G for short, is as far as I know, the worlds first online camouflage generator wherein you can pick which colours you’d like to use in your pattern. The option for squares ( digitalesque ) or circles ( *tarnesque ) are available, as is the option to have between one and four layers of colour.

The math behind the creation of a randomized pattern like this isn’t that hard, but it is a little mind bending and I wont get into it. Oh yes, it is randomly generated, every time you view the image it will be a distinctly new random pattern made from either the default colours I’ve preselected or the custom colours you choose.

 So why is it really really really cool? I can use the script I wrote to generate an image of potentially any size. So for instance you’ve probably seen people who hunt a lot with camouflage everything, even their vehicles ( pickups & ATV’s ) are done in some sort of RealTree or disruptive pattern. The patterns on these vehicles all suffer from what I think is a major functional and aesthetic flaw, the pattern most often painted or vinyled on these vehicles has a visible repetition in the pattern and it looks horrible and not natural in a random true to nature sort of way.

The C.R.D.C.G solves this problem, now not only can you have a completely distinct non repetitive pattern on an object of any size. The colours of the pattern can be chosen to specifically match your surrounding environment and even if you pick the same colours as your friend it would be nearly impossible for the patterns to be identical in any way.

If yould like your own pattern to be generated for use on your vehicle or as a template for airbrushing, email me for a quote on image generation to your specific size.