What you will need

• Ghost Recon (Desert Siege / Island Thunder) v1.3 or higher
• Adobe Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro
• RSB Plugins that shipped with Island Thunder.
• Know how to set up a working mod (can be found here)

Now that we have what we need let’s jump in. Making an effective Ghillie suit is a very basic idea and is almost a lost art. Not many modders do much with the Ghillie suit because the one that comes with GR is effective enough; but take a look at this and see if you can find the sniper:

If you can, the government needs you! Anyway, to start off we’ll apply simple logic as taught by our grade school teachers. We want our sniper to be almost invisible in his surroundings. So for GR (which I will be using in this tutorial) that means a woodland area. More dull browns, greens and the occasional black. Camouflage makes you blend in, but you can still be seen. What better way to be concealed than actually using your environment. Basically what I’m getting at is we’re going to use the GR environment to make our Ghillie.

Start off by opening up ica_us_sniper_body.rsb in your InstallPath\Mods\Origmiss\Character\Allied folder, and then follow up with character_trans.rsb.

In front of you, you should have the sniper uniform, a Ghillie and some goggles. So far, we’re good. Now we’re going to pick an assortment of textures from GR and use them on our Ghillie. Since most of the sniper’s time is spent on the ground, we want him to be concealed with a ground texture (we don’t want a rocky laying around on the floor). So, go ahead and pick a texture form one of your maps (Origmiss\Map) I used one from the caves map (Map\M01_Caves\M01_overgrowth.rsb). This texture is a little tricky, but done right we should have a beautiful Ghillie.

Go ahead and minimize your character uniform, we don’t need it right now. Next, go to our texture. Switch over to our Alpha Channel, and then use the Select>Color Range tool. Select the white area. Go back to RGB and copy the selected area. Paste it over onto the Ghillie suit several times. Don’t worry just yet about where it belongs. Paste it so it covers EVERYTHING (merge the moss into one layer). Then, you’ll have this:

DO NOT MERGE THE LAYERS YET! Before you continue, take the layer with the moss, right-click it, then hit duplicate layer. There should be a drop down menu, that says: ica_us_sniper_body.rsb; character_trans.rsb; mo1_overgrowth.rsb; New. Obviously, we’re going to move it to the sniper uniform. Okay, now continue.

Here’s the easy part. In Character_Trans.rsb, go ahead and go to the alpha channel. Select>Color Range, again, and click on the black. Now go back to RGB and select the layer with all of your moss on it. Hit delete. Don’t forget to make it so the goggles can be seen like this:

Now the Ghillie is done. So minimize it for a bit. Now switch over to the uniform. There should be a big layer of moss. Hide it. (click the eye ball next to the layer). Select the area with the boots, gloves and goggle; then move back to the layer with the moss and delete that area. It only gets easier. Change the moss opacity to about %50 - %65 at most. This still gives us the moss look, but it won’t make us go through hours of work to preserve the uniform. So, we still gain the concealment by the moss texture, and we still have the wrinkles and the other parts of the uniform.

Well here’s the brandy dandy new uniform in action:

The Weapon

Not bad huh? But what’s the weird part about it? The gun! Its camo is different and it doesn’t work. Possibly the one thing that can give him away. We can fix that. Open up the M24 texture file located in Origmiss\Textures\iw_srifle_m24_camo.rsb. Assuming you still have the moss open, do another copy and paste over top the camo that’s there. Don’t worry about alpha channels or anything of the sort, just fill up the entire thing. It’ll work out. Now, open up iw_srifle_m24.rsb. Make a new layer with only moss camo. Hide it. Select the camo on the gun. Select>Inverse (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+I) and then hit delete. You’ll now have this:

And, with the gun, Ghillie and uniform all camoed we get our final result:

For those of you who are curious, here’s the answer to the first shot I showed you.

Additional Notes

-I used only GR active to get my Ghillie to work. For some odd reason with DS/IT activated it refused to work. I would suggest editing all of the ghillies before panicking. However, I wrote over the original GR files (I do NOT recommend doing this! AT ALL!), which may be part of it. If used as a mod, I’m %99.9 certain it will work with out a flaw.
-Choose your textures wisely. As I said earlier, you don’t want a stone or a tree laying around on the ground. When your sniper needs to be concealed the most is when he’s shooting; which means he’s on the ground. Pick shrubs, bushes, sand, grass anything but something that would require him to be crouched or standing to be concealed.
-To make your ghillie about 10 times more realistic. Get a bunch of leaf and/or branch files; I used 4. Then as I said; make them cover the entire 512x512 canvas. So you should have about 4 layers that cover the canvas. Start playing with the blendings; duplicate layers whatever. I duplicated two of my layers; left one as a base texture and it came out BEAUTIFULLY!

If you have any questions or comments, please, don’t be afraid to e-mail me