I've seen passing reference made to the reflective scenery popping in/out at certain distances to an object with the suggestion that it may be related to the distance which the final (largest) mip map is displayed.I have such a problem with a G-Max built building where the reflective texture suddenly "lights up" at about 500m from the object.Has anyone got a solution for this? The bitmap was created in Paint Shop Pro, the alpha channel was added, it was saved as a tiff then imported into Imagetool to add the mip maps and finally it was saved as a DXT3. I'm not aware of any further manipulation I should make to the bitmap to change the behaviour of the smaller mip maps.Suggestions?David

It is normal that the reflections are only visible from a certain distance, from further away they are not used. I haven't tested if 500 meter is really that distance, but it can very well be.

I think it's to do with mipmaps, ie if you convert to DXT3 only mipmap0 has the alpha channel. I suspect this is a bug. Try to build your own mipmaps in paint shop pro, and import them into imagetool, rather than using the auto mipmap generation of imagetool. I never tried it, because in my opinion reflective textures are useless because they don't take the light direction into account.Cheers, Christian

ChristianI have now tried making my own mipmaps in PSP but I have not been successful. My texture is 512x512 so I took a copy of it and resized it down to 256x256 to add a single mipmap which had an alpha channel - just as an experiment. In PSP I saved it as a tga and tried to open it with "add mipmap" in Imagetool, but I got an error about it not being a supported format. Does it have to be a bitmap for Imagetool to use it as a mipmap?Or am I going about this the wrong way?David

Hi David.Try saving as *.psd ( PhotoShop format )... that will import to Imagetool.Dick

The TGA format should also work, I have used that sometimes. But maybe there is a difference between adding mipmaps and loading an image.

I have never seen any mipping problems with DXT3 using either ImageTool or DXTBmp. Both will happily create a full chain of Alpha`d Mips.I suspect the problem lies elsewhere. Maybe FS just doesn`t bother displaying reflections beyond a certain distance.

>In PSP I saved>it as a tga and tried to open it with "add mipmap" in>Imagetool, but I got an error about it not being a supported>format. Does it have to be a bitmap for Imagetool to use it as>a mipmap?>>Or am I going about this the wrong way?Hi!Make sure you save the *.tga in PSP as uncompressed tga file, see my attachment.I have had no problems with alpha channel when I do the textures with Imagetool, importing tga's or creating mip maps in Imagetool itself.Tatuhttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/11275.jpg