Cockpit panel lights

[Sid2008]

Hi, This question is really vexing me so i am throwing it out to my flight sim buddies. I also asked Milton Shupe, and I found that i was too dumb to understand his answer (which is not surprising).

Here is the question: many virtual cockpits have little red, green, white, orange lights that come on or off with raising/lowering landing gear, or turning batteries on, and so on.

How does one model thse lights in the VC? I use FSDS to model my planes.

Thanks,
sid

[SkippyBing]

Not sure about the ins and outs of FSDS, but in gMax what I do is make a texture that has the colours I want to use (e.g. red, green and amber) and use that to make a material.
For the material I use the texture for the diffuse map (i.e. it's natural colour) and the self-illumination map (the colour it glows).
Play around with the emmissive settings (not sure but I think you may need FSDS tweek for this) so it glows nicely (I think I use Additive Blend).
Apply the material to whatever you want to light up, then add a visibility tag to the object so it only appears when you want it to e.g. when the gear is down.
I'm sure someone will be along with a better method in a minute!