I have tried to create a building with reflective texture without success. Can FSDS v2 only create reflective textures for aircraft and not scenery objects?Regards,David S.

I haven't tried this, so I can't give you any real answer, but are you sure that your alpha channel things are done correctly?

Yes, I created a transparent texture first which should also create an alpha channel.

I don't know FSDS, but I did some testing with reflective textures on buildings: It doesn't work!Well, it actually does work, but not correctly. The way it should work is like this:1) You specify a specular colour which is used as the reflective colour. This part works. For example, specify a yellow specular colour and when the sun shines on a building side it reflects yellow light. I only know how to do that in gmax though. 2) But mostly, you want to specify a gloss map, ie only the windows are reflective, but bricks are not. This is where it's broken. The gloss map doesn't work together with the specular colour (as it should), but instead uses an ambient white light. This means all sides of your building will be reflective (independent where the sun is) and it will only reflect white light. In my opinion it looks really stupid.Reading through the scenery SDKs I get the impression that M$ hasn't finished the code for reflective buildings...Sorry for being so technical, if you didn't understand the technical side, I hope the my examples made it clear...Cheers, Christian

Basically a transparant texture should work (if you specified different levels of transparancy).But from my GMax experiments I know that in GMax it only works OK for aircraft. You can apply it also on a building there, because GMax then says the texture is an aircraft texture. This means that the texture quality is set with the aircraft texture slider, etc. Not a very good way thus.I think that the scenery engine is not yet ready for buildings with reflective textures and that they work best for aircraft at the moment.Arno

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Christian,I must admit I really don't use GMAX much. I prefer using FSDS v2. I have done further experiments and have realised reflective texture do work for buildings, but only when viewed from a distance of about 2,000 feet or less.Regards,David

David,They only sort of work. As I wrote above, the reflectiveness doesn't depend on the position of the sun. The sides of a building in the shadow shouldn't reflect any light, but they do. It really is a bug, because just using specular colour it all works fine. Just trust me, it doesn't work correctly yet. If you can live with how it works now that's great. Personally, I think it doesn't look very realistic. If you want to see screenshots of what I'm talking about, do a search in this forum. I posted some a while ago...The reason you have to get close is because the mipmaps are wrong. You can fix that if you make your own individual mipmaps and import them into imagetool manually. Or just don't use mipmaps.Cheers, Christian