I've been wondering for the past couple of days, how some of our great MSA community, can actually whip out some realistic looking camoflauge patterns.

What programs do you use? Do you use an Adobe Brushead of the sort?

What tips can you give to the community when making uniforms/skins, and how can we make their quality definition in certain programs remain almost normal or at least higher, with no denied cost to apply it in Jeds HLMV? :)

My trick is to use really simple flat colours for the pattern and use a burn/noise layer over the top. I sometimes get really complex and use multiple greyscales/alpha's to dodge and burn in creases but overlays can be just as effective and simple.

The reason I use greyscale masks is that I can tweak and alter the base cammo at will and don't risk a collosal fsck up if I make a goof on the crease map.

As for the camo - look at it carefully and dont be distracted by the creases and lighting. Try and just outline the pattern and colours itself, work at 1.5 to 2 times the final size you'll use (things look a little better once their shrunk sometimes) and then its just a question of tweaking from there.

- Jed

Always wondered how you skinned clothing lol

- Ska

With addition to this, whats too bright, and too dark, for something as standard to the default player models?

I'd figure on personal preference, but with different lighting maps existing for certain levels, and certain video cards actually tweaking certain aspects for player models, what would be a good balance?

What ever looks best on your PC, and stuff the rest....lol

I use similar methods to that Jed when making flag skins.

Use various shades of grey as the light colour in HLMV. That will give you an idea of what your model will look like under various lighting conditions in your map.

- Jed

Ahh heh.

Oh yea, something else:

I noticed that some German Smock Patterns used either a black, light red, light green, or light yellow base first before the rest of the design.

However, some of this are elequently outlined by other colors usually surrounding the later applied--what can we do with layers, that might help us in some quick edits?

Well if you want to ouline a blob of colour you can either use the outline modifier in Photoshop 6+ (double click the layer and look for the stroke properties) or Select the blob and do a modify expand/contract and then fill the smaller blob in over the top.

Err I didnt explain that very well...

Basically in photoshop I always think to myself how would I make this if I was doing it with layered art paper and transparent plastic.

- Jed

Here is a link to a plugin for Photoshop, that makes camo, don't know if it's any good, as i only had a quick play with it, but it might be good for making a base to work from.

"Camouflage" plugin (http://www.v-d-l.com/adrenaline.html)

It seems you can save out your camo pattens from it aswell, so if anyone makes any good ones, or good camo bases to work from, maybe you could post your saved cfg file here.

well my attempt at camo took me 5 minutes and im no texture artist. all i did was get a green background and added squigly lines of military camo colours (light/dark greens, browns, yellows etc) on different layers and blurred them, then merged them. i then chose their opacity and then i added some (badly done) wrinkles on a new layer of gray, and set it to a mode which made it partly invisible so only the wrinkles showed up then i added noise on a new layer and blurred it diagonally then copied and flipped then voila! Good luck. btw. i used adobe photoshop.