Suppress shadow, and seasonal textures.

[mfy1989 1]

Firstly would just like to say hello to everyone as this is my first post here :) Been reading the posts here and everyone seems really knowledeable and friendly so hoping someone will know the answer to my questions!My first question is basically I've had some problems with placing trees where there are autogen exclude areas, so I've decided to try making my own trees that don't get excluded. I'm a bit of a newbie and I've just managed to crack the whole transparent texture/alpha channel thing, but have hit another problem - that of shadows! Obviously with a transparent bitmap, the shadow that gets cast is a big rectangular one, rather than the shape of the non-transparent bitmap areas that form the tree. I know it's possible to suppress shadows for just this purpose, but I can't find any info on how to do it anywhere! If anyone can advise on this I'd be hugely grateful! My second question relates to seasonal texturing - autogen trees have four sets of textures that are used for different seasons, and I'm wondering how I can achieve a similar thing for my trees? Is there a good tutorial about designing trees for FS scenery?You can probably guess I've not been in the scenery design circle for very long so please accept my apologies if my questions have been done and overdone before :( Anyway any advice or pointers would be gratefully received, thanks all :)Tim F

[arno 1]

Hi Tim,Which version of FS are you using?For FSX there is an option in the FlightSimX material (no shadow) that allows the suppression of the shadows for a certain material. Seasonal textures is more difficult though, that is not possible with the FSX MDL format. For the autogen the default scenery uses different models, but the changing between them can only be done by autogen and not in static scenery objects.If you are using FS2004 you would have to tweak the MDL file to get the two effects you want. You can do this by editing the ASM files or by using the MDL Tweaker II tool I made. You can get this tool at http://www.fsdeveloper.com

[mfy1989 1]

Arno you're a star! Thank you so much for your help, looking forward to trying it out :)Regards,Tim