Reflective texture problem in FS2002

[Guest]

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

[arno 1]

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.

[Guest christian]

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

[Guest]

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

[rhumbaflappy 113]

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

[arno 1]

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

[Guest]

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.

[Guest]

>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