I notice the new army camouflage patterns have computer-style staircasing. Is this designed to confuse digital cameras, the result of a much cheaper manufacturing process, or some third explanation?
Having just completed a training course that included a lot of camouflage fundamentals, delivered by the people who really know this shit, let me be the first to say that Barrington has given a great answer in the thread Rick linked to.
That’s the whole point of the woodland camouflage patters we’re all so familiar with: to break up edges.
Consider the smooth lines and sharp edge constrasts of the last-generation woodland camo. From a distance, those lines still stay sharp and identifiable lines, so they’re easy to spot at a distance. That’s okay, because they’re not there for breaking up the interior of the pattern so much as the edges. The splotches disrupt the outline of the person or vehicle. In other words, one of the three primary colors in woodland camo was bound to blend in to the background…the edges or corners of your silouhette that match the background will seem to disappear, thus breaking up your outline and making you harder to recognize. But the camouflage scheme doesn’t do much to hide the middle of your body, it also doesn’t do much to prevent detection, just recognition or identification. As many people can attest, people dressed in woodland camo are easy to spot in a woodland environment, especially when they move. Maybe not blaze-orange easy, but they’re not invisible either. Same goes for vehicles; camo patterns don’t hide the fact that there’s a big-ass vehicle out there. They do, however, make it tougher for the enemy to tell whether they’re looking at an APC or a tank.
The new, pixellated patterns begin with the same principle. But then they add noise to the lines that separate colors, and they also discretize those edges. The benefit of this change is that from a distance, that aliased line now turns blurry. Where the sharp line between, say, black and green used to stay sharp at a distance, the new pixellated line quickly turns to a smudge. And that’s what helps mask the interior of your outline, and not just the edges. Smoothing out the contrast gradients, even a little bit, makes you a lot less conspicuous when you’re hiding in the woods.
(And it wasn’t until last week that I had even heard of dazzle paint schemes for ships, but damned if it isn’t a good idea.)
That Dazzle paint job is just amazing! Thanks for the replies.