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FSXA Day and night textures with different transparency?

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125
Country
sweden
Is it possible to have diffuse and self-illumination maps with different alpha channels?

The basic problem I try solve is to show lamp lights on the ground in the night. I'm try to do it by texturing a ground polygone.

I have without success, tried to make a fully transparent day texture (as a placeholder for the diffuse map) and with a semi-transparent texture for the night texture (set as the self-illumination map).

The day texture is visible (if I test by removing the alpha channel), but the night texture, with lamp light, is not visible at all.

Both textures are saved as DDS-DXT5, with the Dxtbmp tool.

I using FSX with SP2 and ADE9X as place tool and compiler in Windows 7.

I'm using SDK-gmax för FSX. I know it's better to use the SDK för FS2002, but in this case, I don't think that's the problem. Or?
 
My 5 little cents:
First of all you have to ensure that GMax really does export the transparent parts at all at the desired place.
I have spent a number of days in the past to figure out what realy happens if you work with that transparency objects.
For any reasons it seems to be important in which port in GMax you designed the object.
"Normal case" is that you get failure objects, x, y, z missmatched, placement missmatched if you match any object or if you define a multible element object. But: You will not see that in GMax. Can be prooved again and again: any attached objects lead to failure.
If you work with polygon extrusions it works.
If you like I can show you the photos of one of my tower-designs. Encountered at such a simple task a number of problems. Was very time consuming to solve them. At different objects it did w3ork. So I was confused. In the end, after a lot of tries I figured out what the underlying problem realy was.
 
Geometry is Geometry is Geometry.

Gmax has a bug which corrupts Mirrored parts, but apart from that, it does not matter which viewport you make the geometry in.

What matters is the geometry itself.

For transparent objects in FSX the other facets that are more difficult to come to terms with are: drawing order and Z-test material settings.

As you have ascertained, FS does not read the alpha layer from a Self Illumination texture. Depending on what you are trying to do, there may be another solution.
 
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