RnS SPECIAL REPORT fEAR gEAR CAmOufLAgE PATTERnS - fEAR gEAR CAmOufLAgE PATTERnS - fEAR gEAR CAmOufLAgE PAT

With the next geneRation oF camouFlage PatteRns being debated in the usa at the moment We Will continue to look at What is out theRe! this month We WeRe PRivaleged to sPeak With iain collinson, ceo oF the cutting edge PatteRn develoPment comPany FeaR geaR.
Iains father was a British soldier (R.E.M.E) and in 1993 he was stationed in Hong Kong. At the time Iain was just 19 years old and doing casual work waiting for the family to get sent back to the UK where he was hoping to follow in his Fathers footsteps and join-up; as John Lennon once said though Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans so by the time the orders came through in 1997 he was settled and had made a life in Hong Kong, so the family headed back to the UK.. Iain had a fascination with uniforms and especially camouflage but was not impressed with the available patterns and found that ghillie suits were not really practical for the heat and humidity found in the local environment. Having made lots of custom gear he decided to attempt to design a new camouflage pattern better suited to the terrain in Hong Kong. He told us: I wasnt really thinking far enough ahead to be concerned with how I would get the pattern onto a uniform, I just wanted to see I could design something that might work for the local environment. After a couple of false starts he realized that there was a lot more to camouflage design than just slapping down some random blobby shapes in appropriate colours so he started to study and read as much as he could about the science of pattern design. He openly admits that he learned a lot from other designers such as Dominic Hyde, Brad Turner and Guy Cramer and in 2009 he started work on the FEAR Camo pattern. He eventually joined the International Camouflage Uniform Society (ICUS) and met Riaan Roussow, a renowned camouflage expert. Riaan gave him some fantastic insight into the intricacies of how our minds interpret the information our eyes see and Iain tried to utilise these ideologies into his pattern.

fear gear camouflage patterns

Finding the Right Path
Eventually he had a pattern that was performing better than hoped, so he then began to think about the next step of actually making a uniform using this pattern. By coincidence his girlfriend worked for a fashion manufacturing company and had contacts in China that could print the fabric and make the uniform but explained the MOQ issues and that no factory would agree to print fabric and make one single uniform! She did find one factory that would make a sale sample run of 200 uniforms but that would mean that as he only needed one he would have to be sure that he could sell the other 199, a direction he hadnt anticipated! Iain was concerned that there would not be such a large demand for a pattern that was developed for a tropical environment, in fact everything was suggesting that the industry was leaning toward more transitional colourways. Transitional was the way he had to go! A lot of camouflage designers had attempted to solve the problem of designing new patterns for different environments by re-colouring their original pattern but Iain noticed that the new variants derived from their original pattern werent as very effective despite having an appropriate new colourway because although the colours worked, the geometry of the original pattern remained the same; the texture of the variants just didnt match the new environment. To fix this problem he had to come up with an entirely new way of looking at a camouflage pattern; rather than having a pattern that was effective in one environment that he could develop variants from he needed a pattern that was re-configurable where he could not only change the colour palette but could change the actual texture too without having to create an entirely new pattern. This concept would minimize production cost and lead times.

a novel aPPRoach
The approach was to create a multi-directional modular camouflage system, a pattern designed from concept to be a re-configurable package. The layers of the pattern could be arranged to created three different textures, each texture having its own characteristics such as neutral, subdued and dominant macro elements and high, medium and low frequency visual noise elements. Each configuration could be loaded with any one of their pre-calibrated color palettes enabling Fear Gear to tailor a variant to match the texture (ambient resolution) and naturally occurring colours of any environment. The pattern uses layering techniques to create a perception of depth or relief by simulating light reflecting off a solid object or surface by incorporating highlights and shadows. This is achieved by carefully calculated placement of light, medium and darker elements (enhanced fractals) which gives an otherwise 2D shape the appearance of being a 3D physical object, whether it be a clump of leaves, an outcrop of rock or a depression in the ground. These two combined attributes not only create a diverse spectrum of camouflage variants that offer

unprecedented environmental concealment but also provide a distinctive signature for visual brand, regiment or national identification. Once these modifications had been made Iain developed a transitional colour palette but this coincided with the US Armys Camouflage Improvement Effort Pre-Solicitation so he decided to use the new transitional colour palette as a basis for the requested Family of Patterns and develop a new transitional colour palette (MEC-GB - Multi environmental Camouflage, Grassland Bias). He gave the go-ahead for a Chinese factory to make a prototype uniform based on the US Armys ACU but although the pattern was quite effective the workmanship of the uniform was very poor so he cancelled the rest of the order and concentrated on the US Solicitation. Unfortunately as a lone voice Iain decided to withdraw from the Solicitation due to the scope of the criteria, time frame and the US Armys proposed testing methods; based on his own testing methods he realised that the picture-in picture test was actually a very crude way of testing a pattern at such an advanced level of development.

Patience Pays oFF!

There was a positive outcome however; Iain was approached by a European company that requested fabric samples to test on a new uniform they had developed. The D1RT (desert/urban variant) was in response to that request and so far its performance is exceeding expectations; he told us that he should finish work on that in the coming month or two and have a new prototype uniform to start the next phase of evaluations. The problems of manufacturing the last prototype and recognizing that uniform design and manufacture in general is a very tricky business indeed so Iain has decided that he will not produce products for the end user, instead Fear Gear will provide fabric or licenses to partner companies interested in working with them, and this should expedite production and ensure high quality products. We at Raider applaud Iains devotion to the development of his patterns and we certainly hope to see them taken up and turned into actual garments and gear. Rest assured when this happens youll see it here! For more information please visit www.fear-gear.com

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