Microsoft's Flight Simulator makes use of environment maps to give aircraft the appearance of reflective skin surfaces. Creating an environment map with different qualities can give the skin of an aircraft quite a variety of changes in appearance.
Note: Before editing any files in your Flight Simulator installation, make a backup copy first!
First up is getting an image that's suitable for use as an environment map. The image must be cropped into a square, which has the vanishing point of the horizon about 50% down the height of the image. The default MS envmap.bmp is a 256x256 resolution file with mipmaps, so this is what I'll work with for this article.
Here's a shot of DTXbmp, available for download
here, where I'm saving a digital photo I've cropped to the proper size using Photoshop. I'm saving in extended .bmp format, DTX1 settings, and including mipmaps.
Below are shots of both the envmap image I used, as well as how it looks in FS2004. Clearly visible in the screenshot, the environment map shows detail, perhaps too much detail for an aircraft that isn't well polished.
To solve this, I took my original cropped digital photo into Photoshop, and used the Gaussian Blur filter on it, and repeated the save process in DTXbmp. This gives the results shown below. The environment map now has more subtle details, an improvement I think.
Linear Mode
