FSX night textures (LM) not showing for a custom SketchUp/MCX house model

Gulliver,

This usually comes down to one of two things in FSX:

1. the material in the MDL isn’t actually set up to use a night map, so FSX will never look for the _LM texture no matter what you drop in the texture folder, or
2. the texture naming/format doesn’t match what the material is expecting (FSX is picky here).

1) Confirm the texture base name is exactly what FSX expects
FSX’s night textures are not “LM in the filename anywhere” — they must be the same base name as the day texture with _LM appended.

Example:

• wall.dds (day)
• wall_LM.dds (night)

In your post you mention names like wall_.JPG and wall_.DDS. If your day texture is literally named:
wall_.dds
then the night texture must be:
wall__LM.dds
(two underscores: one from the original name, plus the underscore before LM)

It sounds silly, but this exact mismatch is a common reason the LM “doesn’t work”.

2) Don’t mix conversion methods for the LM — make it the same “type” as the day texture
If the day textures were converted/processed by MCX (rotation, resizing, DDS settings), but the LM was made via a different tool/website, you can end up with a DDS that loads differently (wrong DXT format, no mipmaps, odd header flags, etc.). FSX can be unforgiving.

What I’d do:

1. Make the LM in Photoshop as you are doing.
2. Save a lossless working copy (PSD), then export to a simple image format (PNG or BMP if you have it available).
3. Bring that into ModelConverterX and let MCX convert that LM to DDS in the same way as the day texture (same size rules, same mipmap behavior, etc.).

Even better: if MCX is already managing your texture set, keep everything going through MCX so the DDS output is consistent.

3) Make sure the MDL material actually has a night map
FSX won’t automatically “search for _LM” unless the material/shader is set up to use a night texture.

In MCX, open the model and check the Material Editor for the wall material. You’re looking for something along the lines of a texture slot/reference for the night map / emissive map. If that slot isn’t set (or the exporter/material from SketchUp didn’t create it), then adding *_LM.dds into the texture folder won’t do anything.

A quick test:

1. Load the MDL in MCX.
2. Open the material for the wall.
3. See if there is a night map/emissive texture reference at all.
4. If it’s missing, assign wall_LM there (or whatever the correct base name is), then export the MDL again.

4) Verify the LM is in the same texture folder FSX is actually using
Just make sure you’re dropping it in the same scenery’s \Texture folder that contains the day DDS that is already working. If the day texture is being picked up from somewhere else (global texture folder, another scenery layer), the LM needs to be available in that same lookup path as well.

A couple quick questions so I don’t steer you wrong

• What is the exact filename of the day wall texture in your working setup? (Including any underscores, like wall_.dds vs wall.dds)
• In MCX, when you open the MDL and look at the wall material, do you see a night/emissive texture slot/reference at all?
• What DDS format are your day textures saved as (DXT1/DXT5, mipmaps yes/no)? If you’re not sure, tell me what MCX reports for that texture.

If you post the exact day texture name + what the material shows in MCX, we can pin down whether it’s a naming mismatch or a missing night-map assignment in the material.