[all2]

How good would this be for a 'general' solution to the problem?

Specifically, a good uniform must function across a wide variety of environments; see the USMC uniforms for a good example.

If we had 'active' camouflage that was updated on the fly, this might make some sense?

[arethuza]

You do get what are effectively very large inkjet printers that can print patterns on materials - might be easier to "print" custom camouflage for a particular environment?

[all2]

Repaint / reprint when deployment orders are received? How durable is the print, though? The current paint used on most vehicles is incredible stuff. You can't even mar it with a super-high pressure water cannon.

As for uniforms; I'm not sure any military regular with clout would be willing to do something as practical as custom uniforms based on deployment environment. Too much change, too much innovation.

[arethuza]

Well, I wasn't being entirely serious - but did visit a place where they were printing cloth for use in furniture so it looked pretty heavyweight material.

[rtkwe]

That's way too custom to work for the current army supply and would require a different uniform for a single soldier as they get assigned and moved to different missions. The whole point of the new camo was to be relatively generic so a soldier could be issued one and keep it and also to issue everyone the same pattern.

[encypruon]

Asked the other way around: Why should it result in less 'general' solutions compared to other methods?

Now that I thought about it some more, building a generator might be problematic because unless you want to hide toroids, there wont be a continuous mapping with reasonable amounts of distortion from the surface of the object in question to the 2D plane. That would mean that CNNs can't really be used.