Did you assign your lightmap to the Self-Illumination slot in the Material Editor?
that is the issue - somehow it wont let me assign a different lightmap in gmax. let me take the steps over again, maybe it clears all up...
1) my landing light is mapped with the texture
landinglight.bmp2) i've made small polygons attached to the landing lights, which is white, and they have a basic material, with the name LANDING_LIGHT and is the actual light beams
3) now I need to add the illumination map to the landing lights, and in the position as showed in the highlighted position in the pic...
but when I click on that slot for the material, I can only apply material that is in use, and cannot browse for the material
landinglight_L.
even if I change the name to that material, it also change the mapped material.
Eish!