I read somewhere that steep gradients are retextured by FS2K2 to look like bare rock. Does anyone know how to turn that function off?I would prefer to retexture steep valleys directly because in Hawaii, vegetation clings to almost everything and bare granite-like rock is not very realitic...thanks in advance

Hi JohnWelcome to the forum and to our fascinating hobby of FS scenery design!FS2k2 does indeed retexture steep gradients to look like bare rock. This behaviour is effectively hard-coded into FS and cannot be turned off. It is necessary because the texturing of the ground is controlled on a fairly coarse mesh (approx. 1 km squares) using landclass scenery, and cliff faces would be textured in the same way as the surrounding flatter land without this refinement. Some of the landclasses do actually display vegetation on fairly steep hillsides, so your first approach should be to try creating replacement landclass scenery for the problem areas using John Cillis's Landclass Assistant program, available from this site, or the payware FSLandClass which can be purchased from simFlight.If that doesn't work, you will have to re-texture the terrain yourself using mesh-clinging VTP polygons or something of the sort - there is lots of information about this in other threads on this forum. You can also place trees on hillsides using my Trees Library (available from this site as trees_v3.zip) - but that won't change the underlying rock texture.CheersGerrish

Thanks for the advice..I have downloaded both files from AVSIM, but I can already tell you that just putting down a bitmap with Terrabuilder will do the job.No more rocky granite hillsides in the tropics...I will look into landclass, but this hobby is soooo time consuming. Leave for a few months and you have to cope with a whole new set of arcane terms.