Re-texturing scenery

[Cavscout74]

I have an .api scenery (specifically, the Underground Base by Andrej Urosevic) that I've downloaded and it works great.  However, the default textures for the hill are grass.  The area I'm working in is sandy and I wanted to change the texture file to a sand-like color.  Actually, I did change the texture file to have a dirt/sand appearance, but it still shows up as the original grass texture.  I even deleted the .bgl and recompiled w/ the new texture.  I also renamed the .api and texture and edited the .api to use the new texture filename and that resulted in no texture showing up.  Any ideas?

[CAFedm]

Maybe it's a landclass matter? Try adding a new lanclass value in the area, you would need something like SBuilder to do this though.

[Cavscout74]

Actually, its the scenery object texture I need to change.  The area I'm working in is supposed to be sandy.  But the big grass-covered hill kinda stands out.  The texture .bmp I edited to change the grass to sand, and every .bmp editor I own shows it as sand-colored now, but FS9 shows it as green still.

[dave3cu]

Sounds like maybe you didn't save your edited .bmp to it's proper location in FS. Maybe you edited the .bmp in your unzipped source folder and not the one in FS??? or saved it to the wrong location in FS???

with edited UHOUTS.bmp


Dave

[Cavscout74]

Thanks.  That was half my problem - since the original .bmp was already in FS9, when I recompiled the scenery, it didn't overwrite it.  That other half of my problem is when I modified the .bmp, it saved as a 24-bit .bmp instead of 32-bit.  Unfortunetaly, none of my programs will save a .bmp as 32-bit.  

[dave3cu]

You need DXTBmp, by Martin Wright.

Once installed, you will open the .bmp in DXTBmp, send it to your editor, edit, return it to DXTBmp, and save it in the proper format (in this case the original .bmp is 16bit-444).

Dave

[Hagar]

[quote]That other half of my problem is when I modified the .bmp, it saved as a 24-bit .bmp instead of 32-bit.

[Cavscout74]

Thanks guys, I think thats got it.  I'm at work, so I have change the .bmp at home, but I used the dxtbmp to put the alpha channel back in my edited texture, so all I have to do is copy it to FS9.