>>1837595By understanding that you do not camouflage the tent itsself. No matter how well you do it, it'll never fool somebody looking straight at it.
The trick is to stop people from looking at the tent in the first place. Depending on how much time you're willing to invest, that can mean anything from making camp in a secluded spot, to felling a few trees or putting up nets, to planting trees or vines in order to keep people away.
Regardless of what method you use, as a rule of thumb, your camo should start 50-100m away from your tent. Make it look like there's some undergrowth or fallen trees. At 30-50m, block of the obvious approaches with dead wood, fallen trees, cut bushes, ditches etc. - anything you wouldn't want to walk or drive over. This should already be enough to discourage random passersby. Continue the "undergrowth" up until your campsite. Finally, at 3-5m, "cover" your tent. Not by directly throwing camo on it, but by putting up camo so that there's no angle from which you can make out the shape of the tent.
There's not much point to it though. If you're just staying for a single night, the chances of being seen are already extremely small (unless people are actively searching), and if you're staying for an extended period, you might as well dig into the ground, cover the entrance with a net and be completely invisible.
The only reasons I could think of to go to the trouble of camoing a tent site would be either a military action or organized crime in some backwards shithole where military and police do not have recon planes with IR yet.
