What comes to your mind when you think of an "optic camo" or an active type of a cloak? I'm tryna paint a wargame character with a cloaking device but I havem't yet figured out how to do that without real time rendering texture. Could do with some inspiration, O Ancient One. Thx^^
Interesting question, yo. Reckon the normal active camouflage so popularized by Halo’s Elites is probably a little passé at this juncture, eh? So I get why you might’ve hit a block, but I mean really what’s cooler than turning invisible on a whim?
With any art it’s surely the way in which you portray your ideas as an artist, rather than the ideas themselves, most of the time this is what grabs people. Like, some writer could say they want to put a robot in their sci-fi story, for instance. But what sort of robot are we talking about? It could be anything from Borderlands’ Claptrap, to Knights of the Old Republic’s HK-47, to Infinite Warfare’s E3N, Destiny’s Exos, or Gears of War’s Jack, all the way up to something like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. These are all examples of concepts which fall into the generalized category of “robot” but each bears its own unique signature within that sci-fi habitat, each has differences, some subtle some wildly variant.
In regards to visual cloaking technology, I always wondered if there’d ever be an early portrayal of the active-camo tech (not even in Halo just some other random sci-fi story), sort of like an armored Helljumper looking suit with plating that helps the soldier “blend” with the surrounding environment rather than totally disappearing. If you’ve ever seen M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs you might understand the sort of effect I’m talking about, though in that case this ability seems to be biological rather than technological. But the type of cloak is just one thing, a more important aspect is what you want your soldier to be doing, and how you want to show it, the artistic mimesis goes only so far before your own creativity takes hold.
I remember this live-action trailer for the first (and unfortunately later scrapped) version of Ghost Recon Future Soldier where it shows one of their number sneaking into an enemy bunker to neutralize a drone control center, and it shows him cloaked and just walking past all the soldiers on the perimeter until he reaches his objective. I liked the creativity of that, since he isn’t doing anything bombastic or try-hard, but only because that fits with the narrative of professional recon soldiers in a Tom Clancy style story. I’ll make some GIFs of it below if I can, along with some other examples of cloaking technology in sci-fi. Also, don’t forget the Predator, invisible and blading fools to death in the jungle. That’s always fun. Anyhow, thanks for having the confidence in me to offer any sort of inspiration, dude. That’s one hella compliment, even if I totally sucked at doing so.
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